Software development productivity of Japanese enterprise applications

  • Authors:

  • Masateru Tsunoda;Akito Monden;Hiroshi Yadohisa;Nahomi Kikuchi;Kenichi Matsumoto

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan 630-0192;Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan 630-0192;Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan 610-0394;Software Engineering Center, Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan 113-6591;Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan 630-0192

  • Venue:
  • Information Technology and Management
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

To clarify the relationship between software development productivity and the attributes of a software project, such as business area, programming language and team size, this paper analyzed 211 enterprise application development projects in Japan using a software engineering data repository established by the Software Engineering Center (SEC), Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan. In the analysis, we first identified factors that related to productivity based on a parallel coordinate plot (PCP) and a one-way ANOVA. An in-depth analysis on each productivity factor was then conducted by selecting a project subset for each factor so that the effect of other factors is minimized. Our findings include that the average team size was the strongest attribute relating to productivity. The outsourcing ratio (percentage), which can be controlled by software development companies, and the business sector both showed a moderate relationship to productivity. Finally, product size (FP), the duration of development and the programming language were only weakly related to productivity.