  Agile processes explicitly focus more on team-work than more traditional
management techniques when building software. With high velocity and
responsiveness on team-level come the risk of interpersonal conflict in the
agile organizations. Through a survey with 68 software developers from three
large Swedish companies, I found that the presence of interpersonal conflict
was negatively connected to the agile practices Iterative Development and
Customer Access. The agile practices Iteration Planning and Iterative
Development were positively linked to the measurement of the developers'
perceived team productivity. However, Continuous Integration & Testing was
negatively connected to productivity. These results show which agile practices
are directly linked to team productivity, but also, and more importantly,
indicate which of the agile practices that might be more prone to not work as
intended, when the team struggles with interpersonal conflict. Therefore, I
argue that members of agile teams need training in conflict resolution
techniques in order to lower the risk of interpersonal conflict negatively
affecting team productivity.
