Impact of team skills in Software Quality - A study on twin cities small and medium software development units

The software industry has become a key industry in many developing countries because of the application of information technology in business, manufacturing and many other sectors. Software development produces higher value addition compared to other industries with more skilled human resources. Software project management is one of the challenging issues of researchers, young upcoming entrepreneurs and managers. Software projects have a notorious reputation of poor performance in terms of schedule, cost and quality assurance. The quality of a software product in the software industry is the process, design complexity, software quality models, the quality of a software product is basically determined, by the software development team (Richard 2007; Justin 2006; Evans 2004; Boehm 2007). The skills of the software team determine the quality of the software product (Krishnan, 2003).The technical skills of the software team, leadership skills and the project management skills of the software team determines the quality of the software developed (Judith & Kate2007; Tschang 2001).However the team skills in the context of software development available in the highly reputed companies and small software development units havemain disparities between the team skills available in the developing and developed units. Hence there is a need to study the impact of critical team skills on quality of the software product and assess its variation across different software development units. The objective of this study is to explore the critical skills on quality of software product and how these team skills impact software quality. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were used to examine the relationshipsidentified in the conceptual framework. The data collected nearly from hundred software companies intwin cities were analyzed. The research finding indicated that, there were not many significant differences betweensoftware development units on size, type and ownership.