Productivity Impacts of Software Complexity and Developer Experience (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Productivity Impacts of Software Complexity and Developer Experience The high costs of developing and maintaining software have become widely recognized as major obstacles to the continued successful use of information technology. Unfortunately, against this backdrop of high and rising costs stands only a limited amount of research in measuring software development productivity and in understanding the effect of software complexity on variations in productivity. The current research is an in-depth study of a number of software development projects undertaken by an aerospace defense contracting firm in the late 1980s. These data allow for the analysis of the impact of software complexity and of varying levels of staff expertise on both new development and maintenance. In terms of the main research questions, the data support the notion that more complex systems, as measured by size-adjusted McCabe cyclomatic complexity, require more effort to maintain. For this data set, the Myers and Hansen variations were found to be essentially equivalent to the original McCabe specification. Software engineers with more experience were more productive, but this labor production input factor revealed declining marginal returns to experience. The average net marginal impact of additional experience (minus its higher cost) was positive. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.