The Role of Flexibility on Software Development Performance: An Empirical Study on Software Development Teams

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility has become a critical issue for project management in general and software development projects in particular. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance, there still remains a gap in literature in respect to a software development project outputs. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal that the first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.