Software productivity: potential, actual, and perceived

Software productivity: potential, actual, and perceived Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid and Stuart Madnick In this article, we in-vestigate the dynam-ics of software devel-opment productivity throughout the soft-ware development lifecycle. Our inves-tigation discerns three forms of pro-ductivity, namely, potential, actual, and perceived. This con-ceptual dissection of productivity pro-vides a useful lens for focusing on two distinct sets of man-agerial concerns: losses in the effi-ciency of software production, and losses in the effec-tiveness of manage-rial control. Losses in production effi-ciency stem from faulty processes as-sociated with moti-vation and commu-nication and lead to a gap between poten-tial productivity and actual productivity. Losses in the effec-tiveness of manage-rial control arise, particularly in the early stages of a soft-ware project, from the discrepancy be-tween what manage-ment perceives pro-ductivity to be and what it actually is. The impressive improvements being made in the cost effectiveness of computer hardware are causing an enormous expansion in the number of applications for which computing is becoming a feasible and economical solution. This, in turn, is creating greater and greater demands for the development and operation of computer software systems. A conservative estimate suggests a hundredfold increase in the demand fo