Factors Influencing Productivity of Agile Software Development Teamwork: A Qualitative System Dynamics Approach

Agile method emphasizes on 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 behaviour and productivity are affected by teamwork within an agile team becomes critical. Identifying factors that impact productivity will result in improvement of teamwork. Hence, a need emerges to recognise the significant ones. Doing so will enable project team management to determine the areas where to concentrate efforts in order to improve productivity. The objective of this research is to identify and analyse agile teamwork productivity influence factors by using system dynamics (SD) approach. Identification of main factors influencing productivity and how they impact agile teamwork are carried out through interviews, survey and literature review. From the perspective of agile team members, the four most perceived factors impacting on their productivity are team effectiveness, team management, motivation and customer satisfaction. Lack of agile team management support is found to be the most mentioned reason for failed agile project. The complex interrelated structure of different factors affecting agile teamwork productivity is modeled using influence diagram and Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) for qualitative analysis.