A Model Proposal for Scaling the Productivity Increase in Agile Project Management Methodology

Abstract

Project management in the software industry is the process of successfully planning, managing, and completing software development projects. Software projects can often be complex, constantly changing, and full of uncertainties, so project management is of particular importance in the software industry. There are two basic approaches to the execution of software projects. In the waterfall model, the project stages are operated in the determined order and after each stage is completed, the next stage is passed, while in the agile approach, the project is divided into small and priority parts, and the work processes are repeated at regular intervals and improvements are made depending on the feedback received. Recently, there has been a trend towards managing software projects with agile methodologies, as it provides flexibility and adaptability. However, there is no quantitative evaluation of the benefits of agile structuring both in the literature and in the sector, and this benefit is expressed with verbal expressions referring to the formation of a dynamic culture. For this reason, the productivity increase brought by the agile project approach cannot be measured and the benefit it provides cannot be scaled. In this study, a model that takes linguistic uncertainty into account is proposed to quantitatively scale the productivity increase provided by agile project structuring. The proposed model has been applied in a business where enterprise resource planning solutions have been developed and the effect of the transition from waterfall model to agile methodology on the productivity of the project has been investigated. Within the framework of the procedure proposed by the model, expert evaluations were taken in line with the determined quantitative and qualitative criteria, these criteria were listed with the fuzzy SWARA method, and the productivity increase provided by agile methodology was calculated using this information. The findings also allowed us to get an idea of the point of scaling the increase in productivity across the industry.