Towards Effective Productivity Measurement in Software Projects

Measuring the productivity in software development projects is a historical complex problem. The main problem resides in quantifying the relevant results produced in a software project. Different organizations and persons have distinguished notion about the concept of what is produced and its associated value. Therefore, the appropriate model for measuring productivity in software organizations needs to be unique to each type of organization. In addition, we encountered, based on a broder investigation about the productivity metrics and measurement studies published in literature, that there seems to be a trend towards the use of what we called Value Size based Metrics for productivity measurement. Based on these findings, we defined a process to support the definition of productivity measurement models in software organizations and which takes into account the difficulties of measuring the productivity and reflects the best practices in measurement programs. The adoption of a productivity measurement model based on value helps the organization to focus its efforts to improve productivity in the direction suitable with the high management vision.