What do software team managers want from a skills identification?

Searching for developers with the necessary skills to work effectively on a project is not an easy task for companies. For software team managers, it is important to know their team's experience and what technologies they are using in order to be able to allocate resources optimally. Therefore, in this paper, we decided to study the needs of the managers of a software development company in order to identify their team's skills. We carried out a focus group. We have interviewed 11 managers from a development company (with approximately 75 developers). As result we have mapped 5 issues, 4 possible applications and another 7 needs to create a new methodology for identifying skills. Finally, we conclude that managers are interested in a methodology to identify skills in business flow.

A Statistical Model to Assess the Team's Productivity in Agile Software Teams

Agile methods promise to achieve high productivity and provide high-quality software. Agile software development is the most important approach that has spread through the world of software development over the past decade. Software team productivity measurement is essential in agile teams to increase the performance of software development. Due to the prevalence of agile methodologies and increasing competition of software development companies, software team productivity has become one of the crucial challenges for agile software companies and teams. Awareness of the level of team productivity can help them to achieve better estimation results on the time and cost of the projects. However, to measure software productivity, there is no definitive solution or approach whether in traditional and agile software development teams that lead to the occurrence of many problems in achieving a reliable definition of software productivity. Hence, this study aims to propose a statistical model to assess the team’s productivity in agile teams. A survey was conducted with forty software companies and measured the impact of six factors of the team on productivity in these companies. The results show that team effectiveness factors including inter-team relationship, quality conformance by the team, team vision, team leader, and requirements handled by the team had a significant impact on the team’s productivity. Moreover, the results also state that inter-team relations affect the most on software teams’ productivity. Finally, the model fit test showed that 80% of productivity depends on team effectiveness factors.