Productivity and software quality are topics of perennial interest to IT professionals. Measuring quality is a fairly straightforward process after all, defects are easily countable. But productivity is not so easily quantified. As a result, productivity metrics vary.
Productivity is often expressed via ratio-based metrics like lines of code per staff month or hours per function point. While useful, these measures have one significant limitation: they don’t account for the time frame in which the software is developed. Essentially, they measure cost efficiency rather than the time to market. Unfortunately, it serves little purpose to excel at technical productivity (e.g., saving money) if you miss a marketing window.
So, how do we define productivity, and where do we get the information? Quantitative Software Management, Inc. uses its SLIM software tools and consultative approach to capture the management numbers that enable organizations to effectively estimate, track, and benchmark their software development and maintenance projects. The company maintains a database of some 7,000 completed projects. The data in this article is taken from the QSM Software Almanac: Application Development Series. Organizations submitted data from 536 IT projects sampled from 31 companies in 16 countries, including 16 industries and nine sub-sectors, ranging from Aerospace to Financial IT.
Read more at: Project Times