Academic Journal
Organizing for Software Product Development: The Effects of Team Structure, Product Complexity, and Cross-Team Coordination.
| Τίτλος: | Organizing for Software Product Development: The Effects of Team Structure, Product Complexity, and Cross-Team Coordination. |
|---|---|
| Συγγραφείς: | Hahn, Jungpil1 (AUTHOR) jungpil@nus.edu.sg, Zhou, Junjie1 (AUTHOR) zjj@u.nus.edu, Lee, Gwanhoo2 (AUTHOR) glee@american.edu, Zorin, Vasilii3 (AUTHOR) vasilii.zorin@gmail.com |
| Πηγή: | Information Systems Research (INFORMS). Mar2026, Vol. 37 Issue 1, p603-626. 24p. |
| Θεματικοί όροι: | *Computer software development, *Technological complexity, *Cross-functional teams, *Team building, *Organizational sociology, Agile software development, Intergroup communication |
| Περίληψη: | This study investigates how software development team structures influence performance under varying conditions of product and architectural complexity. Using computational simulation grounded in organizational theory, the research compares feature teams—organized around end-to-end functionality—and component teams—organized around technical subsystems. The findings indicate that feature teams generally outperform component teams, particularly when product complexity is high. Moreover, the study reveals that the effectiveness of team structures is moderated by coordination intensity and team scope. Moderate levels of cross-team coordination yield better outcomes than minimal or excessive coordination, whereas broader subteam scopes can improve performance when coordination is costly or limited. These results have significant managerial implications for software development practice: team structure should be aligned with both the problem space and solution space complexity, coordination mechanisms must be strategically calibrated, and team boundaries should be adjusted based on the organization's capacity to manage dependencies. The study provides a robust framework for informing team design decisions, offering insights relevant to agile software development. Practitioners are encouraged to adopt a contingency-based approach to team organization, tailoring structural choices to contextual demands in order to optimize delivery efficiency and innovation. Despite prior studies on managing the development of software products, it remains unclear which organizational structure is effective in delivering software products to market. In this study, we examine two common approaches to forming software development teams: feature teams that are customer-centric and component teams that are focused on systems architecture. Drawing on the mirroring hypothesis, we propose that feature teams and component teams can mirror the problem space and solution space of the software product, respectively. We investigate which team structure is better suited for building software products with different levels of design space complexity and with varying frequencies of cross-team coordination. Our analysis is enabled by computer simulation based on the NK fitness landscapes model. The findings highlight the critical role of achieving structural mirroring between the team and the design space. The results also identify specific conditions under which the mirrored team structure is effective, as well as circumstances where mirroring the problem space outperforms mirroring the solution space. We find that mirroring of the problem (solution) space is mostly constrained by the complexity of the problem (solution) space, whereas mirroring of the problem (solution) space is less (more) sensitive to the complexity of the solution (problem) space. We also find that structural mirroring of the problem (solution) space is substituted by frequent coordination and can be enhanced by setting broad focus and responsibility. Interestingly, component teams derive greater benefits from cross-team coordination and maintaining a broad focus because of their sensitivity to complexity in both the problem space and solution space. By integrating the simulation results, we propose a theoretical framework that explains the impact of mirroring different spaces on software development performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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