How to Measure Software Development Productivity

The article lists down pages/papers on measuring software development productivity.

• The Theory of Constraints: A good read on measuring software development productivity
• Measuring Productivity of Software Development Teams: The paper lists down different techniques/models for measuring software development productivity.
• CannotMeasureProductivity: Then, there is this article by Martin Fowler which says that it is difficult to measure software development productivity. He points about ineffectiveness of following approaches of measuring developer’s productivity:
  • Lines of codes (LOC)
  • Function points

The software development teams working based on Waterfall model or Agile methodologies model tend to measure the developer’s productivity in terms of following variants:

• Function Points
• Story Points (size) vs Velocity

Following pages present different perspectives on measuring software development productivity as a function of one of the above variants:

• Understanding Software Productivity: The article lists down software productivity measurement studies performed by different organization such as IBM. It also presents some of the key reasons on why one tends to measure software development productivity:
  • How to reduce software development costs
  • At the same time, how to improve software quality
  • Improve the rate at which software is developed
• Using productivity measure and function points to improve software development processes
• Software Sizing & Productivity with Function Points