Title

Software Quality As Influenced By Informational Diversity, Task Conflict, And Learning In Project Teams

Keywords

Informational diversity; learning; project management; project teams; relationship conflict; software development; task conflict

Abstract

From one perspective, diversity leads to an increase in the knowledge and viewpoints that adds to the creativity of the solution and methods during a software development project. From another perspective, diversity adds to the conflict in a project team, which detracts significantly from the desired results. This contradiction may be best explained by an examination of different forms of diversity. This study reports a model that considers informational diversity, in the form of a larger variety of background knowledge, in the system development context. Learning and information theories dictate that conflict related to the completion of tasks will increase under informational diversity. Task-related conflict should, in turn, create learning opportunities, which will provide the spark needed to improve the quality of the software generated by a project team. A team level analysis of survey data from 299 members of 75 development teams confirms these relationships. The promotion of learning leverages the benefits of informational diversity and serves as a mediator between task-related conflict and software quality. © 2009 IEEE.

Publication Date

8-1-2010

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management

Volume

57

Issue

3

Number of Pages

477-487

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2009.2033049

Socpus ID

77954861691 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/77954861691

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