Reflecting skills and personality internally as means for team performance improvement

Formal evaluation of team performance (e.g. with metrics) is a good and well known instrument for providing feedback about finished projects. If performance was behind expectations a further analysis may include an oral discussion of problems that occurred during the project, that have been treated ineffectively or even have been put aside. Such problems may include choice and quality of engineering practices, the appropriateness of role and responsibility assignments and relationships between team members, which have been conductive or obstructive to the team. This feedback improves engineering behaviour and strengthens the problem and conflict solving capabilities for coming projects, but can´t affect any more the project of concern, which already has been finished. This paper proposes the usage of a questionnaire based on skills and personality traits for providing feedback to software project teams during running projects. The result of the assessment should help to improve the performance of the project team by defining roles adequately and putting responsibilities to the right people: It improves the personal relationships within the team, increases the attitude for personal tasks, increases the understanding and respect for the other team members, shows significant misconception of personal strengths and weaknesses and indicates fit or misfit of engineering practices with skills and personalities.