Group Maturity and Agility, Are They Connected? -- A Survey Study

The focus on psychology has increased within software engineering due to the project management innovation "agile development processes". The agile methods do not explicitly consider group development aspects, they simply assume what is described in group psychology as mature groups. This study was conducted with 45 employees and their twelve managers (N=57) from two SAP customers in the US that were working with agile methods, and the data were collected via an online survey. The selected Agility measurement was correlated to a Group Development measurement and showed significant convergent validity, i.e., A more mature team is also a more agile team. This means that the agile methods probably would benefit from taking group development into account when its practices are being introduced.