Interpretative case studies on agile team productivity and management

Abstract

Context

The management of software development productivity is a key issue in software organizations, where the major drivers are lower cost and shorter time-to-market. Agile methods, including Extreme Programming and Scrum, have evolved as “light” approaches that simplify the software development process, potentially leading to increased team productivity. However, little empirical research has examined which factors do have an impact on productivity and in what way, when using agile methods.

Objective

Our objective is to provide a better understanding of the factors and mediators that impact agile team productivity.

Method

We have conducted a multiple-case study for 6 months in three large Brazilian companies that have been using agile methods for over 2 years. We have focused on the main productivity factors perceived by team members through interviews, documentation from retrospectives, and non-participant observation.

Results

We developed a novel conceptual framework, using thematic analysis to understand the possible mechanisms behind such productivity factors. Agile team management was found to be the most influential factor in achieving agile team productivity. At the intra-team level, the main productivity factors were team design (structure and work allocation) and member turnover. At the inter-team level, the main productivity factors were how well teams could be effectively coordinated by proper interfaces and other dependencies and avoiding delays in providing promised software to dependent teams.

Conclusion

Teams should be aware of the influence and magnitude of turnover, which has been shown negative for agile team productivity. Team design choices remain an important factor impacting team productivity, even more pronounced on agile teams that rely on teamwork and people factors. The intra-team coordination processes must be adjusted to enable productive work by considering priorities and pace between teams. Finally, the revised conceptual framework for agile team productivity supports further tests through confirmatory studies.

Introduction

The management of software development productivity is a key issue in software organizations, where the major drivers are lower cost and shorter time-to-market [18], [100]. To manage productivity effectively, it is important to identify the most relevant difficulties and develop strategies to cope with them. Agile methods, including Extreme Programming [10] and Scrum [89], have evolved as approaches to simplify the software development process, potentially leading to better productivity. They aim to shorten development time and handle the inevitable changes resulting from market dynamics [50], [82].

Considerable research has been directed at identifying factors that have a significant impact on software development productivity [100], [106]. In general, the studied productivity factors were related to product (specific characterization of software), personnel (team member capabilities, experience, and motivation), project (management aspects, resource constraints), or process issues (software methods and tools). Continuously evaluating productivity factors is important, as factors may change under new software engineering practices [81].

Although the industry has extensively adopted agile methods, little research has empirically examined the software development agility construct regarding its dimensions, determinants, and effects on software development productivity and performance [54], [95], [8], [35], [92]. Understanding the factors that affect productivity could help determine where to concentrate management efforts (and related financial resources) from a practical standpoint and where to focus research efforts from an academic perspective [86]. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study in the literature has investigated the major factors influencing agile team productivity.

In a preliminary study [69], we investigated general factors influencing agile team productivity using two industrial case studies. The studied teams reported that the main general factors influencing agile team productivity were (1) team composition and allocation, (2) external dependencies, and (3) staff turnover. They also reported that, among the agile practices, pair programming and collocation most impacted productivity variations.

In the current paper, we extend and refine that work. Our objective is now to provide a better understanding of some factors (and mediators) that impact agile team productivity. We have thus conducted a new industrial, multiple-case study that draws on the general team effectiveness literature. We investigate the following research question:

RQ: Which factors do have an impact, and in what way, on team productivity when using agile methods?

In this extension, we added one large company and two data sources for all three companies: observational field notes and documentation from team retrospectives. We performed a more comprehensive analysis based on these sources and developed more detailed explanations on how the most perceived factors impacted agile team productivity. We developed a conceptual framework for agile team productivity, which provides clarity and focus in the study and drives further discussion around the results [70]. Finally, data from multiple-case studies were analyzed thematically and presented in a thematic map.

As the answer to our research question, we found that agile team management is the most influent factor on agile team productivity. Team design choices and staff turnover emerged as relevant intra-team management issues, while inter-team coordination emerged as an important inter-team management issue. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework to support the factor analysis and refine it to incorporate new information based on our findings.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a review on software productivity definitions and a conceptual framework for agile team productivity. Section 3 describes our research question and method in detail. Section 4 presents results from a multiple-case study performed in three Brazilian companies. Section 5 contains a discussion of our findings, and Section 6 concludes and provides suggestions for further work.