Are We More Productive Now? Analyzing Change Tasks to Assess Productivity Trends during Software Evolution

Hans Christian Benestad, Bente Anda, Erik Arisholm

2009

Abstract

Organizations that maintain and evolve software would benefit from being able to measure productivity in an easy and reliable way. This could allow them to determine if new or improved practices are needed, and to evaluate improvement efforts. We propose and evaluate indicators of productivity trends that are based on the premise that productivity during software evolution is closely related to the effort required to complete change tasks. Three indicators use data about change tasks from change management systems, while a fourth compares effort estimates of benchmarking tasks. We evaluated the indicators using data from 18 months of evolution in two commercial software projects. The productivity trend in the two projects had opposite directions according to the indicators. The evaluation showed that productivity trends can be quantified with little measurement overhead. We expect the methodology to be a step towards making quantitative self-assessment practices feasible even in low ceremony projects.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Benestad H., Anda B. and Arisholm E. (2009). Are We More Productive Now? Analyzing Change Tasks to Assess Productivity Trends during Software Evolution . In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-811-98-2, pages 161-176. DOI: 10.5220/0001949901610176

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase09,
author={Hans Christian Benestad and Bente Anda and Erik Arisholm},
title={Are We More Productive Now? Analyzing Change Tasks to Assess Productivity Trends during Software Evolution},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2009},
pages={161-176},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001949901610176},
isbn={978-989-811-98-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Are We More Productive Now? Analyzing Change Tasks to Assess Productivity Trends during Software Evolution
SN - 978-989-811-98-2
AU - Benestad H.
AU - Anda B.
AU - Arisholm E.
PY - 2009
SP - 161
EP - 176
DO - 10.5220/0001949901610176