The Challenge of Productivity Measurement

In an era of tight budgets and increased outsourcing, getting a good measure of an organization’s productivity is a persistent management concern. Unfortunately, experience shows that no single productivity measure applies in all situations for all purposes. Instead, organizations must craft productivity measures appropriate to their processes and information needs. This article discusses the key considerations for defining an effective productivity measure. It also explores the relationship between quality and productivity. It does not advocate any specific productivity measure as a general solution. Introduction A productivity measure commonly is understood as a ratio of outputs produced to resources consumed. However, the observer has many different choices with respect to the scope and nature of both the outputs and resources considered. For example, outputs might be measured in terms of delivered product or functionality, while resources might be measured in terms of effort or monetary cost. Productivity numbers may be used in many different ways, e.g., for project estimation and process evaluation. An effective productivity measure enables the establishment of a baseline against which performance improvement can be measured. It helps an organization make better decisions about investments in processes, methods, tools, and outsourcing. In addition to the wide range of possible inputs and outputs to be measured, the interpretation of the resulting productivity measures may be affected by other factors such as requirements changes and quality at delivery. Much of the debate about productivity measurement has focused narrowly on a simplistic choice between function points and lines of code as size measures, ignoring other options as well as many other equally important factors. Despite the complexity of the software engineering environment, some people believe that a single productivity measure can be defined that will work in all circumstances and satisfy all measurement users’ needs. This article suggests that productivity must be viewed and measured from multiple perspectives in order to gain a true understanding of it. International Standards One might hope to look to the international standards community for guidance on a common industry problem such as productivity measurement. While some help is available from this direction, it is limited. The most relevant resources are as follows: • IEEE Standard 1045, Software Productivity Measurement [2] describes the calculation of productivity in terms of effort combined with counts of lines of code or function points. It recommends variations to address software re-use and maintenance scenarios. It provides a project characterization form, but does not discuss how different characteristics might lead to different productivity measures.