Developer Payroll Approaches for Startup Environment Based on Agile Project Management

Abstract Formulating developer payroll in a software development project is important for organizations to provide an equitable salary formulation that can motivate developers to work professionally. Payroll can also be used as references in planning the cost of software development projects in order to meet startup financial success. In the literature, developer payroll estimations can be obtained by multiplying the number of working hours on a project with the developer’s wage. However, multiplying the number of working hours with the developer’s wage is considered unfair because each developer has different competencies and performance. In addition, not much attention given to understanding how to estimate developer payroll in software development organizations by considering different competencies and performance. For those reasons, it is important to understand how to overcome the different developer’s competencies and performance in developer payroll formulation. Thus, the competency and performance factors can be formulated into the developer payroll. This paper proposes a method in calculating developer payroll for a startup environment based on Agile Project Management by considering the developer’s competency and performance parameters. The parameters consist of how many years developers have been working, what the type of developer role is, how many bugs developers produce and how many days developers are not able to complete the task on time. This study is expected to provide an alternative method to formulate developer payroll at startup environment.