Web Productivity Measurement and Benchmarking

Abstract

Project managers use software productivity measures to assess software development efficiency. Productivity is commonly measured as the ratio of output to input. Within the context of software development, output is often assumed to be product size and input to be effort. However, Web applications are often characterised using several different size measures and there is no standard model for aggregating those measures into a single size measure. This makes it difficult to measure Web application productivity.

In this chapter, we present a productivity measurement method, which allows for the use of different size measures. An advantage of the method is that it has a built-in interpretation scale. It ensures that each project has an expected productivity value of one. Values between zero and one indicate lower than expected productivity; values greater than one indicate higher than expected productivity. We demonstrate how to use the method by analysing the productivity of Web projects from the Tukutuku database.