Economic Output under the Conditions of Social Freedom in Software Development

Software developers organize their work autonomously. Agile development approaches give freedom to developers. However, the discussion about economy often leads to the comparison with manu-facturing processes which are tightly organised. If developers spend too much time on inefficient activities, the performance might decrease. The worst example could be breaks. Breaks could be seen as a reason for economic problems by the management. This paper investigates the impact of breaks on the overall performance in software development. The investigations assume that if developers make pauses in a normal manner, this has not a negative impact on the profitability. In practice, the human-centric development process brings together a business process and a social process. The interaction of both processes was simulated. Due to the execution of 1.500 simulations, we obtained information on the economic progression of the development process under the influence of breaks. We determined the impact of breaks on the overall profitability. This investigation contributes to the discussion of freedom in software development. It helps man-agers to assess if employees who make breaks harm the profitability. This could lead to the imple-mentation of further business constraints.