Enhancing Software Team Planning and Delivery Performance using Agile Driven Quality Measures: Approach, Results, and Recommendations

Abstract

Implementing a performance-management program in an agile software-development organization is important to retain sight of software team performance as a whole as well as linking performance-management metrics to business value. The evaluation criteria for software engineers’ performance have been traditionally driven by metrics that don’t fit into agile-development principles. This research implements a measurement metric that aligns with agile-development core values and principles to evaluate engineers in a software engineering firm using the Scrum development method. The research focused on measuring and evaluating the productivity, development efficiency, social skills, team collaboration and breadth of knowledge. Observing the Productivity Index (PI), Actual Productivity for software Engineers (APSE), and Productivity Variance (PV) for individual software engineers and the development team at the end of each sprint helped the development team have a better understanding of its productivity levels in a matter that facilitated planning future sprints. In addition, this productivity measure helped early identification of productivity challenges encountered by several software engineers and productivity identification of productivity challenges encountered by several software engineers.

Keywords: Agile development, software teams, process measurement, scrum, productivity, efficiency, software metrics, software project measurement