Analyse Agile Software Development Teamwork Productivity using Qualitative System Dynamics Approach

A highly productive team throughout an agile software development process is very instrumental in achieving project success. This research presents a system dynamics (SD) based approach to model agile software development teamwork productivity by analyzing productivity influence factors. Identification of main factors influencing productivity and how they impact agile teamwork are carried out through interviews, survey and literature review. A study has been conducted on seventeen software companies in Bangladesh. 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 management support is found to be the most mentioned reason for failed agile project. The findings from these sources are compiled into a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) for qualitative analysis of the teamwork productivity influencing factors. The resulting qualitative model is expected to provide more insight into the agile teamwork dynamics and establish a basis for a further quantitative modelling. 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. The future step will be the dynamic simulation of the teamwork productivity model based on the qualitative model in this paper. Keywords-agile teamwork productivity; influence factors; qualitative system dynamics; team effectiveness.