Towards Understanding the Relationships between Interdependence and Trust in Software Development: A Qualitative Research

Context: Interdependence deals with the dependence on others that people encounter when executing their tasks. This dependence is influenced by technical, social and psychological factors that affect the way the work is done. Software development is almost always performed by teams. Consequently, trust among team members is likely to affect individual and team performance. Similarly interdependence, as an intrinsic team characteristic, also can influence team performance. Objective: To study the perception of work interdependence and its relation to trust among software engineers that work with agile methods. Method: We selected an organization and performed 6 interviews with a team composed of different roles. We asked about task interdependence perception, trust perception, and the impact of interdependence on trust. Results: Our results show a direct link between factors such as feelings, maturity, and technical level with trust, and its impact on interdependence. Conclusion: This is still a preliminary investigation. Nevertheless, our findings showed that trust is an important psychological factor that can be influenced by both maturity and technical levels.