Communication in Teams - An Expression of Social Conflicts

  • Jil Klünder
  • Kurt Schneider
  • Fabian Kortum
  • Julia Straube
  • Lisa Handke
  • Simone Kauffeld
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9856)

Abstract

The more members a team has, the more information needs to be shared with single team members or within the whole team. Sufficient information sharing is difficult to ensure, since a project leader will not be fully aware of all on-going information and communication within the team. In software engineering, information flow is essential for project success. In each part of the process, information like requirements or design decisions needs to be communicated with appropriate persons. Neither missing nor wrong implemented requirements are desirable, since extra working hours or incomplete working results need to be paid. Therefore, the right amount of information sharing is highly desirable. To ensure this, communication is a mandatory requisite. Furthermore, knowing about social conflicts is suitable, since these influence the information flow.

In an experiment with 34 student software projects, we collected data referring to internal team communication and mood. In these projects, we could show a correlation between chosen communication channels, social conflicts and mood. Since social conflicts foster an insufficient information flow, knowing about these helps software developing teams to reach higher quality and a higher customer satisfaction.

Keywords

Team Member Positive Affect Communication Channel Social Network Analysis Project Leader 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the German Research Society (DFG) under grant number 263807701 (Project TeamFLOW, 2015–2017).

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Copyright information

© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jil Klünder
    • 1
  • Kurt Schneider
    • 1
  • Fabian Kortum
    • 1
  • Julia Straube
    • 2
  • Lisa Handke
    • 2
  • Simone Kauffeld
    • 2
  1. 1.Software Engineering GroupLeibniz Universität HannoverHannoverGermany
  2. 2.Department of Industrial/Organizational and Social PsychologyTechnische Universität BraunschweigBraunschweigGermany

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