AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAMWORK PRODUCTIVITY- A SYSTEM DYNAMICS APPROACH TO ANALYSE THE PRODUCTIVITY INFLUENCE FACTORS

Abstract

The agile method emphasizes the people factors and strength of teamwork that simplify the development process. A highly productive team throughout an agile software development process is very instrumental in achieving project success. Consequently, understanding of how individual behavior and productivity are affected by teamwork within an agile team becomes critical. Identifying factors that impact productivity will result in the improvement of teamwork. Hence, a need emerges to recognize the significant ones. Doing so will enable project team management to determine the areas where to concentrate efforts in order to improve productivity. Improvement in Agile Software Development (ASD) will not be achieved without considering that there is a large number of factors affecting agile teamwork productivity. The objective of this study is to explore what factors influence agile teamwork productivity, and how these factors interacted. This is achieved through a two-phase approach and the use of system dynamics as the modeling tool. The first phase involves reviewing relevant literature, performing a set of in-depth interviews with agile team members and conducting a survey to identify productivity factors. The second phase involves the construction of a System Dynamics (SD) model of agile teamwork productivity with the findings from the first phase to analyze the productivity influence factors. In the first phase, a survey has been administered to 60 respondents from 18 agile software companies in Bangladesh. The findings from the first phase reveal that from the perspective of agile team members, the most perceived factors impacting their productivity are motivation, team effectiveness, and team management. The culture of social hierarchy in a self- managed agile team obstructs implementation of agile practice. Although, the most followed organizational structure is horizontal, Scrum is leading agile practice among the participating companies. Lack of management support is found to be the most mentioned reason for any failed agile project. In the second phase, a system dynamics model of agile teamwork productivity is constructed to analyse the productivity influence factors. The complex interrelated structure of different factors affecting agile teamwork productivity is modelled using influence diagram, Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) and stock and flow diagram. The resulting model attempts to capture dynamic characteristics and nonlinearities of ASD teamwork productivity influence factors with an emphasis on the management of agile teamwork. Using the proposed model, the project manager may find the origin of a decrease in productivity, evaluate management strategies along with their effects on teamwork productivity. It also focuses on how well the simulations match the predictions from the theory and survey results from the first phase.