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Productivity of software projects: a case analysis
by Olli-Pekka Hilmola, Petri Helo
International Journal of Information Technology and Management (IJITM), Vol. 5, No. 1, 2006
Abstract: Process management tools aim to reduce information flow complexity in product development, in the function where most work is organised through projects. In technically challenging project environments, the total number of known technological solutions is high, reuse of old work is low and productivity improvement is rare. This paper analyses the management of a software company by using system dynamics simulation. The model results are compared with real project data collected from a software company; we evaluate six different Java-projects with two operative productivity measures. According to the results, it seems that even smaller projects have opportunities to achieve high productivity, but this only happens occasionally. Analysis further reveals that the most important limitation for productivity enhancement is the final stage of a particular software project (last 15–20% of completion). Therefore, we propose that managing information flows in the final stages of software project is vital for future success of the software, and we argue that performance is strongly connected in the used project management approach (waterfall, increment, prototyping).

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