Effective social productivity measurements during software development: an empirical study

Much of contemporary scienti c discussion regarding factors that in uence software de- velopment productivity is undertaken in various domains where there is an insu cient empirical basis for exploring socio-technical factors of productivity that are speci c to a software development organization. The purpose of the study is to characterize the mul- tidimensional nature of software development productivity and its social aspects as a set of latent constructs (i.e. variables that are not directly observed) for a medium-sized software company. To this end, we designed an exploratory in-depth eld study based on the hypothesized productivity constructs, which were modeled by a set of factors identi ed from literature reviews, and later re ned by industrial focus groups. In or- der to demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we conducted con rmatory factor analysis with the data attained from a questionnaire with 216 participants. To investigate factors of in uence further, we analyzed the impact of selected team- based variables over the latent constructs of productivity. Taken together, our ndings con rm that such an approach can be used to explore the quanti able in uence of socio- technical factors that would a ect productivity of a particular software development organization. Ultimately, the resulting model provides guidance to explore the compara- tive importance of a set of rm-speci c factors that may help to improve the productivity of the organization.