Software Productivity: Harmonization in ISO/IEEE Software Engineering Standards

Abstract — The software productivity is an important key of software quality factors. The productivity measure has become a tool for managers since it is used to compare the performance between different companies (benchmarking) and to compare the efficiency of different developers in the same company. Therefore, it allows doing strategic planning and decision making based on such measurement. A variety of international standardization bodies such as IEEE and ISO as well as software engineering researchers have proposed a set of factors which influence the software productivity attribute, and also a set of measures to evaluate it. However, there is no unique model that integrates all the software productivity best practices. The aim of this paper is to survey the available international standards and research work on software productivity and figure out the key differences in order to propose a standards-based model. Such model will include the set of quality attributes that could be used to reflect the software productivity, and a set of measures that allows evaluating the software developer’s productivity