Towards a contextual model of software engineering capabilities: Factors affecting team performance

A prevalent research stream in the information systems domain is founded on the rationale that organizations need to establish and manage specific IT capabilities to achieve competitive advantage. More recently, research efforts have shifted from investigating organizational-level capabilities towards identifying team capabilities in order to support modern approaches to software engineering. The research at hand aims to identify contextual factors which influence these software engineering capabilities required by teams to achieve superior performance. To this end, we adopt a mixed-methods approach conducting a tertiary study and an empirical research component involving six domain experts. The tertiary study results in a taxonomy of 56 contextual factors which are then reduced and validated with regards to their relevance to software engineering teams through a Q-Sort ranking exercise and a subsequent focus group session. This results in a subset of 15 items which together form a contextual model of software engineering team capabilities along the dimensions technology, organization and environment. The paper discusses the mature research stream on information systems context in the new light of modern software engineering approaches. The resulting contextual model is of value to researchers and practitioners when analyzing their team context and deciding in which capabilities to invest.