  An agile approach has become very popular over the last decade, which
requires good communication and teamwork within teams as well as with outside
stakeholders. Therefore, social interaction is central for a software
development team to be successful. Such social interactions form social
identities and social structures in both teams and organizations. This study
investigates possible effects that the social identity of individuals may have
on the effectiveness of software development through seven in-dept interviews.
The qualitative data from interviews were analyzed and summarized using
summative content analysis, and the seven individuals also answered a
questionnaire on social identity taken from social psychology research. The
qualitative result shows that aspects of social identity affect software
developers' behavior, and that we need to build cross-functional stable teams
over time also from a pure social identity perspective in addition to the
product related aspects to avoid a decreased effectiveness. However, we did not
see clear connections to our operationalization of effectiveness in this study,
and the quantitative analysis was also inconclusive, but we see value in our
suggested method when investigating social identity in software development.
