Productivity Evaluation Indicators Based on LEAN and their Application to Compare Agile and Waterfall Projects

Despite the increasing importance of responding quickly to markets and customers, many organizations that are contracted to develop software are still unable to move from waterfall to agile development. Major reasons include not only the incompatibility of current labor laws with agile development but also the inability to determine the productivity (cost, duration) of agile development. This paper proposes indicators to evaluate and compare the productivity of projects by focusing on "value building" in LEAN. To promote agile development, NTT Laboratories have been running agile development trials using delegated agreements (similar to time and material contracts) since 2018. Using the proposed indicators, we compared the statistics of 20 agile trial projects and more than 200 waterfall development projects. Results revealed that agile development became superior to waterfall development in terms of delivery time and cost when its feature-used rate was 30% higher than that of waterfall development.