Empirical Evaluation of Agile Teamwork

During the fall 2020 we observed and tracked several student teams working remotely and independently to develop a non-trivial software product as the capstone project for a course of Software Engineering in our university. The teams used an integrated open-source development environment that we designed to be useful to support and measure Agile development efforts, storing all artifacts and logging productivity and interaction data. Moreover, teams were required to use the Essence visual language during the retrospectives in order to analyze and improve their Scrum-like process. The tools used by the teams were used to store and collect several process data, that post-mortem were also integrated by the answers given by the students to some questionnaires. This paper proposes an empirical evaluation of the process followed by the teams, using a teamwork quality model and an Agile maturity model. The two models highlight different facets of the teamwork. We have studied and compared the development and interaction activities of the teams, and found a correlation between the results of the two models.