A Theoretical Validation of Team Productivity and Project Progress Metrics with the context of Agile Software Development

Abstract

Software metrics has an increasing role within various software development process, especially in agile development context. This role comes from its contribution to measuring, tracking, and auditing quality at the project, process, and product levels. In addition, they support practitioners in making decisions in a timely manner especially if the attribute being measured related to team productivity and project progress.

Several studies have been conducted to develop metrics to measure team productivity and project progress in Agile Development. However, these metrics suffered from the lack of systematic validation, the difficulty of using them since they rely on complex mathematical analyses. As a result, their direct use will increase the risk of project failure due to its reliance on untrusted measurement results and inaccurate interpretation of their indicators.

This research aims at validating several proposed team productivity and progress metrics; Productivity of the Team Within an Iteration (PTI), Increase in Progress Within an Iteration (IPWI), Actual Progress in an Iteration (API), according to a theoretical validation methodology to ensure their use in agile software development approaches.

The validation results showed the relative possibility of using each of the PTI and API metrics, unlike the another metric (IPWI(, which need to be reconsidered.