An Empirical Investigation into Social Productivity of a Software Process: An Approach by Using the Structural Equation Modeling

The actual and expected benefits of fostering the alignment of people factors and cooperation among software development teams enables software development organization to improve software development productivity. Furthermore, software development productivity presents a significant challenge for both understanding and quantifying the performance characteristics of software development organizations. This paper introduces an approach to model software development productivity by using structural equation modeling (SEM), a technique that can be used for testing and estimating relationships using empirical data. We also present preliminary results from an exploratory study about the enabling social factors that affect software development productivity. Our quantitative analysis involves grouping productivity and social productivity factors for studying and identifying their implicit relationship. To this end, we issue questionnaires to test our hypothesis and to gather sample data. The paper concludes by showing initial results, limitations, and directions for future research.