An approach for improving the social aspects of the software development process by using a game theoretic perspective:towards a theory of social productivity of software development teams.

As software development is considered a form of knowledge based social activity, investigating social interactions and behaviors of individuals and teams constitutes a starting point for improving organizational performance and productivity. Therefore, a software development organization is regarded as a form of social network, which may be more efficiently structured based upon participants’ skills, roles and capacities to exchange information. This paper aims to propose a research framework for modeling development activities in terms of social interrelationships. It investigates ways for improving the productivity of the software development process to several social issues (e.g. team formations, interpersonal conflicts, social loafing) that affect the group setting during the software development process. An industrial survey will be conducted to validate the proposed framework. This survey will be applied to three medium size software organizations; (i) to measure social aspects of productivity, (ii) to assess the effectiveness of our approach, (iii) and to improve the welfare of the software development organization. Semi-structured interviews with practitioners, and expert reviews with the managers will be used to evaluate the results. Ultimately, based on the principles of our game theoretical approach and collected data, we propose a research framework, which will benefit future research by drawing a road map that establishes a body of knowledge, specifically on software development teams and organizations.