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Software productivity measurement

Published: 16 May 1983 Publication History

Abstract

Productivity is a crucial concern for most organizations. This is especially true for software development organizations. Although the term productivity is widely used, the difficulty of defining it leads to serious problems in productivity measurement. This paper will attempt to survey some current productivity measures for software development organizations and discuss their deficiencies. A theoretical productivity model that overcomes these deficiencies will also be presented. A practical productivity measure that exceeds current measures by including a quality component will also be described. Although this measure is only a small improvement over contemporary measures, it is a promising step in the direction of better productivity measurement.

References

[1]
Halstead, M. H. Elements of Software Science. New York: North-Holland, 1977.
[2]
Albrecht, A. J. "Measuring Application Development Productivity." In Proceedings of the Joint Share/Guide/IBM Application Development Symposium, 1979, pp. 83--92.
[3]
Crossman, T. D. "Taking the Measure of Programmer Productivity." Datamation, 25 (1979), pp. 144--147.
[4]
Boehm, B. W. Software Engineering Economics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981, pp. 533--553.
[5]
Collofello, J. S., and S. S. Yau. "Some Stability Measures for Software Maintenance." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-6 (1980), pp. 545--553.
[6]
Boehm, B. W. Characteristics of Software Quality. New York: North-Holland, 1978.
[7]
Sommerville, I. Software Engineering. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982.
[8]
Walston, C. E., and C. P. Felix. "A Method of Programming Measurement and Estimation." IBM Systems Journal, 10 (1977), pp. 10--29.

Cited By

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  • (2017)Productivity paradoxes revisitedEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-016-9453-522:2(818-847)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
  • (2011)Automatic mining of change set size information from repository for precise productivity estimationProceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Software and Systems Process10.1145/1987875.1987889(72-80)Online publication date: 21-May-2011

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AFIPS '83: Proceedings of the May 16-19, 1983, national computer conference
May 1983
808 pages
ISBN:0882830392
DOI:10.1145/1500676
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 May 1983

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Cited By

View all
  • (2017)Productivity paradoxes revisitedEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-016-9453-522:2(818-847)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
  • (2011)Automatic mining of change set size information from repository for precise productivity estimationProceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Software and Systems Process10.1145/1987875.1987889(72-80)Online publication date: 21-May-2011

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