People Management in Software Agile Development

Abstract

People Management (PM) is part of software project management since the Software Development Process (SDP) depends on the people who do it. In order to maximize the success of software projects, agile methods focus on people and their interactions. However, agile projects still suffer from the risks of failure. Understanding that PM is a complex and central activity in the SDP, this paper aims to map how academic studies describe the PM in the software development environment, what good practices are described by these studies and how the software industry has applied the PM. Therefore it is intended to build a PM model for agile software development approaches. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was carried out in order to obtain data regarding the state of the art of PM in the agile development, and also a questionnaire format survey, which was answered by professionals working in the industry to map the application of PM mechanisms in software development organizations. From the data obtained in the SLR and in the questionnaires applied it was proposed a model of People Management. The proposed model was generically constructed to serve as a PM guide in agile projects, regardless organization characteristics and the development team where the model will be implemented.