Focus Factor and Hyper-Productivity of Agile Teams: A Study of 8 Open-Source Projects

Abstract

One of the ways to understand and improve the productivity of agile project teams is through the usage of metrics that monitor productivity. Despite the emergence of new methodologies and metrics in recent studies promoting productivity increase in agile teams, the utilization of these metrics should be accompanied by a thorough understanding of the factors that affect them. This thesis analyzed data extracted from JIRA repositories of 8 open-source projects. Two productivity metrics, focus factor, and velocity increase were calculated. The projects’ sprints were classified as hyper-productive and healthy using the values of the calculated metrics. In addition, different project factors such as the team size, the number of new team members, and the sprint length were studied. This thesis aims to describe the differences between the productivity metrics with their corresponding states and the project factors. The results showed that there are only statistically significant differences between the team sizes of hyper-productive and non-hyper-productive sprints, while there are no statistically significant differences between the project factors and the healthy and non-healthy sprints. This thesis also highlights some limitations of these metrics and their corresponding states after applying them to the real open-source projects’ data.