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Software Development Productivity
of
European Space, Military and Industrial Applications
K. Maxwell, L. Van Wassenhove and S. Dutta
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
October 1996
 
Abstract
The identification, combination and interaction of the many factors which influence software development productivity makes the measurement, estimation, comparison and tracking of productivity rates very difficult.

Through the analysis of a European Space Agency database consisting of 99 software development projects from 37 companies in 8 European countries, this paper seeks to provide significant and useful information about the major factors which influence the productivity of European space, military and industrial applications, as well as to determine the best metric for measuring the productivity of these projects.

Several key findings emerge from the study. The results indicate that some organizations are obtaining significantly higher productivity than others. Some of this variation is due to the differences in the application category and programming language of projects in each company; however, some differences must also be due to the ways in which these companies manage their software development projects. The use of tools and modern programming practices were found to be major controllable factors in productivity improvement. Finally, the lines-of-code productivity metric is shown to be superior to the process productivity metric for projects in our database.

Full paper available [download pdf file].
 
Also of interest:
Benchmark your Software Development Productivity Online
Software Metrics Research


 
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Applied Statistics for Software Managers is the first complete guide to using statistical techniques to solve specific software development and maintenance problems. You don't need a mathematical background: Katrina Maxwell presents an easy-to-follow methodology and detailed case studies that show you exactly how to assess productivity, time to market, development effort and maintenance cost drivers. 
  
Book includes real software development and maintenance data from one bank. 
  
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I've also written two additional benchmarking papers published in IEEE Software:
Benchmarking Software Development Productivity
Benchmarking: Collecting for Comparability