Productivity in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Many organizations dedicated to software development have adopted agile principles with the aim of increasing their productivity. Agile Software Development (ASD) encourages the delivery of working software frequently; however, there are many factors that affect productivity in that context. The objective of this paper is to analyze the research works about productivity in ASD to identify: the factors that affect productivity, the most used research methods, the most studied productivity levels, the concepts related to productivity, the most studied agile methodologies, and the use of productivity metrics in ASD. To perform such analysis, we conducted a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) in which we included 25 primary studies. As result of the SMS, we identified the main factors that affect productivity in ASD and the context in which the included primary studies were performed. We found that Case Study was the most used research method, and interviews and questionnaires are widely used as data collection methods. We found that most of the reported factors affecting productivity in ASD are related to agile teams, and although quality should be related to productivity, it was not considered in all studies.