Although software applications are gaining ubiquitous presence in almost every walk of human life, the task of developing high quality software within the budgeted time and cost still remains a great challenge. With the increasing pressure on time to market, attaining acceptable levels of performance on effort and cycle time, the quality and productivity in software development projects is still a major concern for software development firms.
Although software applications are gaining ubiquitous presence in almost every walk of human life, the task of developing high quality software within the budgeted time and cost still remains a great challenge. With the increasing pressure on time to market, attaining acceptable levels of performance on effort and cycle time, the quality and productivity in software development projects is still a major concern for software development firms.
It would, therefore, be useful for both practitioners and researchers to understand the factors that impact effort, cycle time and quality and productivity in software projects so that future efforts for improving the development and project management processes could be better directed. With this objective in view, this paper presents gleanings from prior empirical research on the determinants of effort, cycle time, quality and productivity in software projects. The findings are based on a study of a number of papers published in several standard journals by various authors whose empirical research work had used the actual project level data from live companies. The findings are organized in terms of the specific factors related to product, project and process dimensions that impact the above mentioned four outcome measures, namely, effort, productivity, cycle time, and quality.
It is quite interesting to note from the survey that while a host of products and project related variables, such as product size and complexity, team capability and size, application type and domain, team's prior experience in the domain and development platform and process maturity level, seem to impact effort and hence productivity, size alone turns out to be significant at CMM level 5. Further, while many variables such as, product size and complexity, requirements volatility and process maturity, seem to impact cycle time and quality, size alone becomes a significant determinant at level 5. The paper concludes with a discussion of the observations based on the literature surveyed. It highlights a scope for empirical research and further exploration or validation of the potential impact of upstream stage process and project measures on the end-of-project performance metrics
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