A Review of Productivity Factors and Strategies on Software Development

Since the late seventies, efforts to catalog factors that influences productivity, as well as actions to improve it, has been a huge concern for both academy and software development industry. Despite numerous studies, software organizations still do not know which the most significant factors are and what to do with it. Several studies present the factors in a very superficial way, some others address only the related factors or there are those that describe only a single factor. Actions to deal with the factors are spread and frequently were not mapped. Through a literature review, this paper presents a consolidated view of the main factors that have affected productivity over the years, and the strategies to deal with these factors nowadays. This research aims to support software development industry on the selection of their strategies to improve productivity by maximizing the positive factors and minimizing or avoiding the impact of the negative ones.