Team Productivity Factors in Agile Software Development: An Exploratory Survey with Practitioners

Abstract

Agile software development (ASD) has favored the software industry thanks to the early delivery of value to customers and for providing certain advantages for their work teams, including increased productivity. Productivity in ASD is a relevant concept, it is still under study and is composed of a set of factors that allow to determine the performance of each of the members of a team. The purpose of this article is to compare professionals’ perceptions of team productivity in ASD with productivity factors identified in a preliminary Systematic Literature Mapping (SMS). The study is oriented under the protocol for the construction of surveys in Software Engineering by Kitchenham and Pfleeger. As a result, the perceptions of 82 professionals working with agile methods were obtained, who associate productivity as an indicator of improvement within the team’s processes and in the fulfillment of objectives to a client, this last aspect being also recurrent in the SMS. Finally, for the professionals only 22 factors are relevant for the evaluation of productivity highlighting Velocity, Communication, Work Capacity, Commitment, Team Leader, and Quality which are categorized into Meaning, Impact, Flexibility, and Socio-Human. © 2024, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.