A software process engineering approach to improving software team productivity using socioeconomic mechanism design

Software development is a knowledge and human intensive activity. At the social level, the interactions of these participants and their ability to cooperate are important for improving the productivity of teams and organizations. It is therefore not surprising to discover that recent contributions in software development have repeatedly asserted the critical role of people in software development efforts. However, existing approaches to software development fail to fully exploit the importance of social and intellectual capital that has been highlighted in the fields of economics and sociology. We propose that leveraging the existing approaches from economics and sociology and applying to software development can assist software organizations in maximizing their return on investment. For example, by applying one such approach, mechanism design, we can improve and model the organization's total productivity based on social aspects affecting productivity (i.e. social productivity). This paper will discuss the vision and progress for applying the concept of mechanism design for optimizing software development teams.