An Insight into the Capabilities of Professionals and Teams in Agile Software Development: An Update of the Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Agile Software Development (ASD) confronts the challenge of effectively measurement and predicting the capabilities of software engineers and teams to improve individual performance, team efficiency, and project success. This study delves into exploring and identifying gaps and research prospects in assessing and predicting human capabilities within ASD. Thus, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review, building upon a prior review from 2001 to 2016 by different authors. To encompass primary studies published after 2016, we extended to 2022. Further, our study extends the scope of the previous SLR with a new research question to identify key attributes in publications focused on agile team formation. Our findings disclosed new attributes for evaluating and predicting the capabilities of professionals engaged in ASD, such as Openness to Creativity and Agile Adaptation. These attributes boost individual performance, contribute to ameliorated team productivity, and facilitate the precise composition of teams. Moreover, this study expands our prior study, providing more details on capability identification and research design, extends the analysis of attributes and prediction models, provides a more granular discussion of discoveries and comparisons with prior review, and more indepth discussion about practical implications and thoroughly examines study validity. We observed that technical metrics were more prevalent than social and innovative aspects. Also, the study identified the prediction of agile capabilities as an emerging research domain necessitating further scrutiny due to the scarcity of existing models. The majority of studies (78%) supplied detailed metric descriptions, facilitating the evolution of the capabilities repository and supporting future investigations in this domain. Ultimately, these findings can aid agile practitioners in formulating team composition decisions based on individuals’ and teams’ appraised and foreseen abilities.

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