Context Most models of teamwork describe team behavior and effectiveness using an Input-Process-Output approach. In software engineering, the use of such models has focused on understanding and operationalizing the Process-Output components while less research effort has been applied to define and measure the Input-Process component. Objective To develop and validate a measure of teamwork process antecedents (inputs) that addresses specific characteristics of software teams in industrial practice. Method First, we reviewed the group work literature, identified and integrated previously described antecedents of work group process, and developed a measure to tap those antecedents. This measure is operationalized in the Teamwork Process Antecedents (TPA) questionnaire, which we then validated with 375 Brazilian software engineers from 100 companies, using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Results We created a survey to operationalize two multidimensional antecedents of teamwork process, Team Structure and Team Composition, based on well-established models from the literature on work teams. We tailored the response items to the software engineering context to increase construct face validity. We reached a parsimonious set of five dimensions for Team Composition (16 response items) and four dimensions for Team Structure (11 response items). Our results show that our measure of TPA has excellent internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Conclusions We created a novel measure of antecedents of teamwork process tailored to software teams, that captures the perception of team members about the adequacy of team composition and structure to achieve team goals. Further, we present the development of the TPA measure in the form of a guideline that may be used in the construction of other measurement instruments in empirical software engineering research. We believe both results are important contributions of this work.

中文翻译：

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团队合作过程前因 (TPA) 问卷：开发和验证评估团队合作过程质量前因的综合措施

背景 大多数团队合作模型使用输入-过程-输出方法来描述团队行为和效率。在软件工程中，此类模型的使用侧重于理解和操作过程-输出组件，而较少的研究工作用于定义和测量输入过程组件。目标 开发和验证团队合作过程前因（输入）的度量，以解决工业实践中软件团队的特定特征。方法 首先，我们回顾了小组工作文献，识别并整合了先前描述的工作小组过程的前因，并制定了挖掘这些前因的措施。这项措施在团队工作流程前因 (TPA) 问卷中得到实施，然后我们与来自 100 家公司的 375 名巴西软件工程师进行了验证，使用探索性和验证性因素分析。结果 我们根据有关工作团队的文献中的完善模型，创建了一项调查，以实施团队合作过程的两个多维前因，即团队结构和团队组成。我们根据软件工程上下文定制了响应项，以提高构造表面效度。我们为团队组成（16 个响应项）和团队结构（11 个响应项）的四个维度达成了一组简约的集合。我们的结果表明，我们对 TPA 的测量具有出色的内部信度以及收敛和区分效度。结论我们创建了一种为软件团队量身定制的团队合作过程前因的新度量，它捕捉了团队成员对团队组成和结构是否足以实现团队目标的看法。此外，我们以指南的形式介绍了 TPA 度量的发展，该指南可用于构建实证软件工程研究中的其他度量工具。我们相信这两个结果都是这项工作的重要贡献。