Teamwork Quality and Team Performance: Exploring Differences Between Small and Large Agile Projects

Agile principles were originally developed for small projects but are
now widely used in larger projects with hundreds of developers. Teamwork
quality is essential in any development work, but how does teamwork quality
differ in small and large agile projects? We report from an explorative survey
with 64 agile teams and 320 team members and team leaders, from 31 teams in
small projects and 33 teams in large projects. For small projects, teamwork
quality was considered by both team members and team leaders to primarily
affect product quality. For large projects, the effect of teamwork quality on
product quality was positive when it was rated by team members but was
negative when rated by team leaders. At a finer granularity, the six dimensions
of teamwork quality that we investigated affected team performance differently
in small and large projects. These findings question to what extent findings from
previous studies on teamwork in agile development in small projects apply to
large projects.