Team performance assessment and improvement in an agile methodology framework

Improving the performance of work teams is a key issue for any organization because it has a direct impact on the productivity and quality involved in the generation of its products and/or in the provision of the services it offers. The performance of a team can be increased through improvements in the performance of each of its members or the team as a whole. There are several mechanisms to try to achieve performance improvements, however, for a correct orientation of possible actions, it is necessary to evaluate the current performance of the team and each of its members to highlight possible weaknesses or opportunities for improvement. An improvement process is by nature continuous, changes are incorporated gradually and at the same time, the achievements must be reinforced. Agile methods are closely aligned with improvement performance of teams. For instance, Scrum establishes Retrospective Meetings which are exclusively dedicated to continuous improvement of teamwork. This paper proposes a model for assesment and improvement of team performance within an agile methodological framework. In addition, a support tool that implements the model is presented. The model and its tool have been developed and refined through its application for more than a decade in two software engineering subjects. In these subjects, we apply the Project-Based Learning (PBL) teaching method, according to this the students work as a team throughout the subject in a software development project. Although our proposal has been generated in the academic field, we think that it can also be applied and be useful in an industrial context.