How do Process and Team Interaction Depend on Development Technologies?

Context: To be more flexible, companies call more and more for an independence between development tools and processes. To enable this form of decoupling we need to understand the interrelation of processes and development tools. However, knowledge about that field is rare.Goal: The goal of this study is to better understand how technologies in use might impact the processes and team interaction.Method: Therefore, we conducted a case study at Ericsson using grounded theory, performing a series of interviews among 6 senior developers and architects. The investigated case is special in that alternative tooling/language settings are used to build the different parts of the same system.Results: As a result we identified several relations between process and tooling. We further report on additional observation about human factors involved in development.Conclusion: The findings show that a bad choice of technologies can lead to unexpected impacts on team dynamics.