An empirical study of the Cobb-Douglas production function properties of software development effort

Authors:
Parag C. Pendharkar;James A. Rodger;Girish H. Subramanian
Affiliations:
Department of Information Systems, School of Business Administration, Penn State Harrisburg, 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA 17057, USA;Department of MIS and Decision Sciences, Eberly College of Business & Information Technology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA 15705, USA;Department of Information Systems, School of Business Administration, Penn State Harrisburg, 777 West Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA 17057, USA
Venue:
Information and Software Technology
Year:
2008

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Abstract

In this paper we study whether software development effort exhibits Cobb-Douglas functional form with respect to team size and software size. We empirically test this relationship using real-world software engineering data set containing over 500 software projects. The results of our experiments indicate that the hypothesized Cobb-Douglas function form for software development effort with respect to team size and software size is true. We also find increasing returns to scale relationship between software size and team size with software development effort.