Beliefs underlying teams intention and practice: An application of the theory of planned behavior

Many theories aim to understand the beliefs underlying an intention or behavior. These theories are currently used to seek answers about how people progress from intention to practice in business environments. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is today one of the most popular sociopsychological models for the prediction of behavior. It is believed that people consider the implications of their actions and act based on a reasonable assessment of those implications. In this context, belief can be defined as the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. So, behavior is driven by what is believed, by what is culturally assumed to be true about the world. Our work aims to study and characterize a belief system applying TPB in project teams in terms of organizational and team levels factors associated to beliefs about the software development practices. A set of interviews on origins, sources and impacts of beliefs on software pr actices was conducted with professionals from different project teams and companies. The results point out to a strong influence of past experiences and show that it is possible to characterize belief systems in software project contexts within a behavioral perspective.