[Paper Review] A Systematic Review of Productivity Factors in Software Development

Stefan Wagner, Melanie Ruhe|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jan 19, 2018

Software Engineering Research26 references84 citations

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews productivity factors in software development, balancing technical and soft factors, and provides a consolidated list of influences to support modeling and improvement efforts.

ABSTRACT

Analysing and improving productivity has been one of the main goals of software engineering research since its beginnings. A plethora of studies has been conducted on various factors that resulted in several models for analysis and prediction of productivity. However, productivity is still an issue in current software development and not all factors and their relationships are known. This paper reviews the large body of available literature in order to distill a list of the main factors influencing productivity investigated so far. The measure for importance here is the number of articles a factor is mentioned in. Special consideration is given to soft or human-related factors in software engineering that are often not analysed with equal detail as more technical factors. The resulting list can be used to guide further analysis and as basis for building productivity models.

Motivation & Objective

• Identify and categorize factors influencing productivity in software development from software engineering, management, and organizational psychology literatures.
• Distinguish between technical and soft factors and synthesize them into unified lists.
• Rank factors by frequency of mention to indicate overall importance and guide model building and improvement efforts.

Proposed method

• Perform automated and manual literature search across four major portals and additional sources.
• Incorporate seminal books and references to establish baseline factors.
• Extract and unify factors into product, process, and development environment categories for technical factors; and corporate culture, team culture, capabilities, environment, and project factors for soft factors.
• Rank factors by the number of sources in which they are mentioned to indicate prominence across studies.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 What factors influence productivity in software development across the literature?
• RQ2 How do soft (human-related) factors compare to technical factors in terms of reported influence on productivity?
• RQ3 How do factors vary by domain, project type, or organizational context when affecting productivity?

Key findings

• A wide range of factors influences productivity, encompassing both product-related, process-related, and environment-related technical factors alongside soft factors.
• Communication effort tends to be positively associated with productivity, especially as team size grows; overall domain context can alter which factors are most influential.
• Experience alone is not consistently predictive of productivity; developer capability and domain-relevant skills are more impactful.
• Domain and organization context shape the strength of various factors, suggesting the need for context-aware productivity models.
• Soft factors, such as team cohesion, communication quality, and governance culture, are consistently considered important alongside technical factors.
• The study provides structured lists of factors to support modeling, measurement, and targeted productivity improvements.