Productivity Measurement in Software Engineering: A Study of the Inputs and the Outputs

Abstract

Productivity measurement is constructed by the measure of tree categories of elements: inputs, outputs and factors. This concept, which started being used in the manufacturing industry, has been also a research topic within Software Engineering (SE). In this area, the most used inputs are time and effort and the most used outputs are source code and functionality. Despite of their known limitations, many of the most used productivity measures are still being used due to the information that they provide for management goals. In order to enable the construction of new productivity measures for SE practitioners, the existence of other inputs apart from time and effort, and other outputs, apart from source code and functionality is analyzed in this paper. Moreover, differences in usage of the inputs and production of the outputs among some SE job positions are analyzed and explained.