An Investigation on Performance of Software Enhancement Projects in China

As two major performance measures, software productivity and quality convey critical information in supporting many decision making situations during project planning, management, as well as process/organization benchmarking processes. However, there is a lack of investigation on these performance measures with respect to enhancement projects, this leads to, in many enhancement/maintenance cases, the inappropriate application of techniques or benchmarking data resulted from studies using development project data. In this paper, through analysis of 264 enhancement projects in China, we seek to develop in-depth and comprehensive understanding about software enhancement projects, by examining the variance of productivity and defect density by several significant influencing factors, such as business area, region, language, programming tool, project size, and team size.