Finding Factors Impacting Productivity in Software Development Project Using Structured Equation Modelling

Abstract

The size of international software industry is over $1000bn. Total revenue earned by the Indian software industry in year 2005 was $30bn and which is expected to grow. The price quoted by vendors to its customers and the rate of the customer service is dependent on the productivity of the project. Given the fact that software development complexity is on an ever-increasing curve, it becomes critical to tackle the issues that influence the productivity levels of the project teams involved. Identification of factors as either aiding or hindering productivity enables management to take steps to encourage the positive influences and to eliminate the negative ones. Hence it is important to understand the factors affecting productivity and how these factors affect productivity when they are present in tandem. Hence this report aims to develop a model using structured equation modelling to find important factors affecting productivity and their impact on productivity. This paper is a further improvement on the paper “Maximizing Productivity by Controlling Influencing Factors and Commercial Software Development”, by Mohapatra, S. The authors expect to come out with a ready model for productivity which can help any software development team in allocating resources to achieve maximum output. The Methodology used for this primary research is collection of data from project and delivery managers across three Indian IT majors and analysing that data employing SEM using a computer aided tool. Results showed that the best fit model consisting of important factors like experience of project team in technology and domain, training for the technology platform to be worked on and domain of work, client support and various other software testing tools availability helps in increasing productivity.