| Prolog to Paper of the Month: The paper of the month series is my attempt at disseminating evidence-based results in Software Engineering research. All papers featured in this section will have been grounded in sound research methods and I will summarise the results. |
Claudia de O. Melo, Daniela S. Cruzes, Fabio Kon, Reidar Conradi, Interpretative case studies on agile team productivity and management, Information and Software Technology,Volume 55, Issue 2,2013. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584912001875
Summary: The authors present a case study of three Brazilian companies to explore factors that affect agile productivity.
Method: The authors use Thematic Analysis to analyze and synthesise information. The sources include interviews and analysis of documentation from the ceremonies in the companies.
Limitations: Being a case study, the generalisation of the results is left to the readers.
Results: The Thematic analysis process leads the authors to three topics:
- Developer turnover: As a result of the mobility in the market, the team composition was not stable during the length of the case study and the authors were able to observe its negative impact on productivity.
- Team Design/Configuration: These include attributes like full-time allocation, diversity (mixed teams), team member skills, team size, and collocation (physical proximity).
- Inter-coordination factors: These refer to coordination requirements within or outwith the organisation (like shared resources, certification requirements, environment homologation), and the perception that it has a negative impact in productivity.
My take on the paper to put the results into practice:
There are not many empirical papers on capacity management, not at least from the point of view presented in this post.
While over 10 years old, this paper still presents relevant findings understanding the need for capacity management and the sources of its variation in agile teams:
- Developer turnover can impact current and future capacity, as the team must adapt to working to reduced headcount, and/or if the team decides to hire new developers, then these new team members will suffer learning curve effects before being able to produce up-to-par with previous developers. Is worth considering how the significance and impact of these changes on Velocity base metrics.
- Team configuration impacts how the agile process is managed. As the configuration drifts away from the idea of agile team configuration, the team must manage the availability and capacity. In organisations I’ve worked with, it is not uncomment to have part-time developers assigned to a process. I do not think this is an impediment to being agile.
- Intercoordination factors: Navigating these factors is part of how the agile team manages the impediments. These can have an impact on productivity. Certification requirements can also seem to impede productivity, particularly if the requirements of the certification standard are not well interpreted in terms of the agile culture.
Tell me, what do you think of these factors? Do they have an impact on your productivity?
Leave me a comment.
