A Statistical Model to Assess the Team’s Productivity in Agile Software Teams

Agile methods promise to achieve high productivity and provide high-quality software. Agile software development is the most important approach that has spread through the world of software development over the past decade. Software team productivity measurement is essential in agile teams to increase the performance of software development. Due to the prevalence of agile methodologies and increasing competition of software development companies, software team productivity has become one of the crucial challenges for agile software companies and teams. Awareness of the level of team productivity can help them to achieve better estimation results on the time and cost of the projects. However, to measure software productivity, there is no definitive solution or approach whether in traditional and agile software development teams that lead to the occurrence of many problems in achieving a reliable definition of software productivity. Hence, this study aims to propose a statistical model to assess the team’s productivity in agile teams. A survey was conducted with forty software companies and measured the impact of six factors of the team on productivity in these companies. The results show that team effectiveness factors including inter-team relationship, quality conformance by the team, team vision, team leader, and requirements handled by the team had a significant impact on the team’s productivity. Moreover, the results also state that inter-team relations affect the most on software teams’ productivity. Finally, the model fit test showed that 80% of productivity depends on team effectiveness factors.

I. Introduction

Agile teams define productivity as timeliness, quantity, quality, and customer satisfaction. According to the studies conducted, the measurement of software productivity is considered an effective approach to control and predict and improve the projects of software companies [1] . However, there is no distinctive definition regarding team productivity in the literature. While in traditional software development methodologies, productivity is measured by the number of Lines of Code (LOC) or Function Points (FP) per time (hour /month) by developers or teams, in agile software development, it is measured in another way. In Agile methods, productivity is mainly addressed by delivered Story Points in each iteration [2 , 3] .