SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT PRODUCTIVITY OF EUROPEAN SPACE, MILITARY, AND INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS

The identification, combination, and interaction of the many factors w hich influence software development productivity makes the measurement , estimation, comparison and tracking of productivity rates very diffi cult. Through the analysis of a European Space Agency database consist ing of 99 software development projects from 37 companies in 8 Europea n countries, this paper seeks to provide significant and useful inform ation about the major factors which influence the productivity of Euro pean space, military, and industrial applications, as well as to deter mine 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 th an others. Some of this variation is due to the differences in the app lication category and programming language of projects in each company ; however, some differences must also be due to the ways in which thes e companies manage their software development projects. The use of too ls and modem programming practices were found to be major controllable factors in productivity improvement. Finally, the lines-of-code produ ctivity metric is shown to be superior to the process productivity met ric for projects in our database.