An Empirical Study on the Use of Team Building Criteria in Software Projects

The goal of this article is to identify criteria used in industrial practice to select members of a software project team, and to look for relationships between these criteria and project success. Initially, using semi-structured interviews for data collection and qualitative methods for data analysis and synthesis, a set of team building criteria was identified from project managers in industry. Then, using this set of criteria and a method to evaluate software project success, a survey questionnaire was created to investigate the relationship between the consistent use or application of the criteria and project success. A cross-sectional survey collected data from 48 projects in 24 software companies and the data was analyzed for internal reliability using statistical methods. The findings show that the consistent use of the set of criteria correlated significantly with project success, and the criteria related to human factors present the strongest correlations.