A Structured Review of Productivity Factors in Software Development

Analysing and improving productivity has been one of the main goals of software engineering research since its beginnings. A plethora of studies have been conducted on various factors that resulted in several models for analysis and prediction of productivity. However, productivity is still an issue in current software development and not all factors and their relationships are known. This paper reviews the large body of available literature in order to distill a list of the main factors influencing productivity investigated so far. The measure for importance here is the number of articles a factor is used in. Special consideration is given to soft or human-related factors in software engineering that are often not analysed with equal detail as more technical factors. The resulting list can be used to guide further analysis and as basis for building productivity models.