Abstract
In this paper, we identify a set of factors that may be used to forecast software productivity and software development time. Software productivity was measured in function points per person hours, and software development time was measured in number of elapsed days. Using field data on over 130 field software projects from various industries, we empirically test the impact of team size, integrated computer aided software engineering (ICASE) tools, software development type, software development platform, and programming language type on the software development productivity and development time. Our results indicate that team size, software development type, software development platform, and programming language type significantly impact software development productivity. However, only team size significantly impacts software development time. Our results indicate that effective management of software development teams, and using different management strategies for different software development type environments may improve software development productivity.
Highlights
Competition in software industry has increased significantly
We identify a set of factors that may be used to forecast software productivity and software development time
Software productivity was measured in function points per person hours, and software development time was measured in number of elapsed days
Summary
Competition in software industry has increased significantly. One of the ways software companies can stay competitive is to improve software development productivity of their software products. Several studies in the literature have measured factors impacting either software productivity or software development time [2,3]. Low productivity organizations can reduce the software development time by increasing the software development team size. We are not aware of any study that uses realworld data and investigates the impact of certain variables on both software development productivity and software development effort. The Blackburn et al [4] study uses survey data and measures managerial perceptions. Management of both software development productiveity and software development time are of paramount importance. We use a real-world data set of 130 different software development projects. We provide a summary, limitations and future extensions of the research
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