A Case Study on the Process Productivity Model for Software Projects in Korea

Derived measures like simple Source Lines of Code per Person Month or Function Point per Person Month do not explain enough about the productivity of a project or an organisation. To complicate the matter, many variables interact with each other in a non-linear way to influence the productivity during project lifecycles. In this paper, we search for the patterns of software productivity using some real project data from Korea. These patterns and trends will be used to construct and validate a project productivity or process productivity model. Process productivity is a notion introduced by Lawrence H. Putnam. It is characterized by the two factors called productivity parameter (PP) and productivity index (PI). Interesting patterns can be observed in these factors when they are classified by project properties like application type, application complexity, etc. This paper tries to find a relationship between project size, effort, and time using the Korean project data. Along the way, the corresponding PP and PI values will be derived. Also, the variables affecting the software productivity in Korea will be identified through a non-linear regression analysis. Simply put, the following topics are covered: a method of constructing a process productivity model; the results and trends implied by the model; the validation results obtained by applying the model on test data; and the lessons learned along the way. 1