A Systematic Review of Productivity Factors in Software Development
Stefan Wagner, Melanie Ruhe

TL;DR
This systematic review identifies key technical and human-related factors influencing software development productivity, providing a comprehensive list to guide future research and model development.
Contribution
It compiles and analyzes existing literature to highlight the most studied productivity factors, especially emphasizing soft and human factors often overlooked.
Findings
Identifies main productivity factors based on literature frequency
Highlights importance of human and soft factors in productivity
Provides a resource for future productivity modeling
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.
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Software Reliability and Analysis Research
