Design Science Research Approach to Metric-Based Onboarding Progress Monitoring in Software Teams

Onboarding in software teams requires the simultaneous acquisition of technical, domain, and organisational knowledge, while the progress of new employees is often monitored through informal and “difficult-to-compare” assessments. This paper presents an integrated, metric-based model for recording and reviewing indicators specified in an onboarding plan and preliminarily examines its functional and computational feasibility using a software prototype. The research was conducted using the Design Science Research (DSR) approach, with the integrated model serving as the central research artefact incorporating selected planning and evaluation concepts from the previously developed OnMod model. The model integrates a conceptual domain model, a functional and structural specification based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and an operational model for measurement and score calculation. The prototype supports versioned onboarding plans, a hierarchical metric tree, four measurement specifications, two additional recording methods, periodicity, normalisation, and fixed-weight aggregation. The contribution lies in defining the links between the plan version, measurement specifications, period-specific records, and hierarchically calculated results. Demonstration and preliminary evaluation were conducted in a controlled, simulated scenario with one expert participant in a small software company. The scenario simulated two weeks of onboarding. An additional sensitivity analysis examined the effects of changes in weights and selected inputs on the same metric tree. The analytical root node score is 0.829375. For the examined endpoint combinations of local weights modified by ±20%, with the weights of the children of each node renormalised to sum to 1, the score ranges from 0.805012 to 0.857072. The preliminary evaluation shows that the specified measurement, recording, and score aggregation procedures can be executed in the prototype within a controlled scenario.