Measures related to social and human factors that influence productivity in software development teams

Abstract

Software companies need to measure their productivity. Measures are useful indicators to evaluate processes, projects, products, and people who are part of software development teams. The results of these measurements are used to make decisions, manage projects, and improve software development and project management processes. This research is based on selecting a set of measures related to social and human factors (SHF) that influence productivity in software development teams and therefore in project management. This research was performed in three steps. In the first step, there was performed a tertiary literature review aimed to identify measures related to productivity. Then, the identified measures were submitted for its evaluation to project management experts and finally, the measures selected by the experts were mapped to the SHF. A set of 13 measures was identified and defined as a key input for designing improvement strategies. The measures have been compared to SHF to evaluate the development team's performance from a more human context and to establish indicators in productivity improvement strategies of software projects. Although the number of productivity measures related to SHF is limited, it was possible to identify the measures used in both traditional and agile contexts.

Keywords

• software project management
• software development productivity
• productivity measures
• human and social factors