Quantifying the Effects of Process Improvement on Effort

at low levels of maturity. The effects of increasing process maturity alone are not easy to determine, because organizations generally make concurrent improvements in other areas that also result in benefits to the development organization. So, a clearer assessment of process maturity effects is needed. Anecdotal case study evidence shows many shortand long-term benefits to improving process maturity.2–9 These studies used different assessment approaches, none of which try to isolate individual factors affecting productivity. Nevertheless, they do indicate that increasing maturity levels generally have positive effects. The premise of this article is that increasing process maturity decreases the effort required to develop a software product (effort is a fundamental component of productivity). The challenge is determining the effect of increased process maturity in the context of other influences on software development effort. I have used a mathematical model to segregate process maturity’s influence on effort from that of other factors. The model quantifies the magnitude of this influence and the relationship between process maturity and the other factors. The results here are based on previous research that Barry Boehm and I conducted.10,11