Productivity of Software Projects by Business Sector: An Empirical Analysis of Trends

Software organisations continuously adopt new technologies and improve their business processes to increase their productivity and hence, be abreast with or ahead of their competitors. This emphasises the importance of investigation into the results of such improvements over productivity over a period of time. In this paper we compare productivity of projects that commenced in and pre-1994 with those that commenced in and post-1997 (the latter a larger sample). Our results reveal very interesting trends in which companies within some business sectors have become very productive due to their past investments, while others are revamping their business processes to help increase productivity in the future. The analysis also reveals important features that play a crucial role in determining productivity within individual business sectors.