Functional group roles in software engineering teams

For building and leading successful software engineering teams it is vital to understand their team structure as well as many other "soft" factors, e.g. the personality and skills of individual team members. A key element of the team structure, besides power distribution, knowledge distribution etc., is the role distribution within the team. The role distribution has a twofold aspect: first, the formal role distribution, which is defined by the standard process and role model or the project management, and second, the informal role distribution which grows within a team by the natural interactions between the team members and is based to some extent upon their individual characteristics.This paper presents an empirical examination of the informal role distribution in student software engineering teams and compares the results to the concept of functional group roles.

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