Factors Influencing Software Development Productivity - State-of-the-Art and Industrial Experiences

Managing software development productivity is a key issue in software organizations. Business demands for shorter time-to-market while maintaining high product quality force software organizations to look for new strategies to increase development productivity. Traditional, simple delivery rates employed to control hardware production processes have turned out not to work when simply transferred to the software domain. The productivity of software production processes may vary across development contexts dependent on numerous influencing factors. Effective productivity management requires considering these factors. Yet, there are thousands of possible factors and considering all of them would make no sense from the economical point of view. Therefore, productivity modeling should focus on a limited number of factors with the most significant impact on productivity. In this chapter, we present a comprehensive overview of productivity factors recently considered by software practitioners. The study results are based on the review of 126 publications as well as international experiences of the Fraunhofer Institute, including the most recent 13 industrial projects, 4 workshops, and 8 surveys on software productivity. The aggregated results show that the productivity of software development processes still depends significantly on the capabilities of developers as well as on the tools and methods they use.