Group Developmental Psychology and Software Development Performance

Due to the fact that software development is a product of team effort it is important to investigate the influence of group developmental psychology on software development performance. In this case study we wanted to test how performance (i.e. velocity and planning effectiveness) are related to the group's maturity level. We gave the Group Development Questionnaire (the GDQ) to 19 software developers to assess their group maturity (i.e. their progress in their group development) and ran correlation analysis against the development velocity and planning effectiveness (i.e. earned points over planned points). The results show that group maturity is correlated to planning effectiveness but not velocity, meaning that group development is connected to the team's ability to plan well, but not their ability to implement tasks fast.