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Software development productivity of Japanese enterprise applications

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Abstract

To clarify the relationship between software development productivity and the attributes of a software project, such as business area, programming language and team size, this paper analyzed 211 enterprise application development projects in Japan using a software engineering data repository established by the Software Engineering Center (SEC), Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan. In the analysis, we first identified factors that related to productivity based on a parallel coordinate plot (PCP) and a one-way ANOVA. An in-depth analysis on each productivity factor was then conducted by selecting a project subset for each factor so that the effect of other factors is minimized. Our findings include that the average team size was the strongest attribute relating to productivity. The outsourcing ratio (percentage), which can be controlled by software development companies, and the business sector both showed a moderate relationship to productivity. Finally, product size (FP), the duration of development and the programming language were only weakly related to productivity.

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Notes

  1. These PCPs were made using DAVIS [8].

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Software Engineering Center, Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan, for offering the SEC dataset. This study was supported by the EASE (Empirical Approach to Software Engineering) project of the Comprehensive Development of e-Society Foundation Software program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan. This work is being conducted as a part of StagE Project, the Development of Next Generation IT Infrastructure, supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5 Takayama, Ikoma, Nara, 630-0192, Japan

    Masateru Tsunoda, Akito Monden & Kenichi Matsumoto

  2. Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, 1-3 Miyakodani, Tatara, Kyotanabe, Kyoto, 610-0394, Japan

    Hiroshi Yadohisa

  3. Software Engineering Center, Information-Technology Promotion Agency, 2-28-8 Hon-Komagome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-6591, Japan

    Nahomi Kikuchi

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  1. Masateru Tsunoda
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  2. Akito Monden
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  4. Nahomi Kikuchi
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  5. Kenichi Matsumoto
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Correspondence to Masateru Tsunoda.

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Tsunoda, M., Monden, A., Yadohisa, H. et al. Software development productivity of Japanese enterprise applications. Inf Technol Manag 10, 193–205 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-009-0050-9

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