An Empirical Analysis of Productivity and Quality in Software Products

Abstract

We examine the relationship between life-cycle productivity and conformance quality in software products. The effects of product size, personnel capability, software process, usage of tools, and higher front-end investments on productivity and conformance quality were analyzed to derive managerial implications based on primary data collected on commercial software projects from a leading vendor. Our key findings are as follows. First, our results provide evidence for significant increases in life-cycle productivity from improved conformance quality in software products shipped to the customers. Given that the expenditure on computer software has been growing over the last few decades, empirical evidence for cost savings through quality improvement is a significant contribution to the literature. Second, our study identifies several quality drivers in software products. Our findings indicate that higher personnel capability, deployment of resources in initial stages of product development (especially design) and improvements in software development process factors are associated with higher quality products.software quality and life-cycle productivity, cost of quality, cmm, software process areas, front-end investments

Strategic innovation through outsourcing: The role of relational and contractual governance

“…Even if a client attempts to specify the skills of the supplier's personnel required to work on delivering the strategic innovation initiative, such skills will be difficult to verify, and project staffing can always be manipulated by the supplier as the project progresses (Gopal and Koka 2012), for instance by moving highly qualified staff to higher risk projects. Consequently, we posit that there is a risk of exercising opportunism by the supplier that is likely to negatively affect outcomes of the strategic innovation project by staffing the project with less qualified personnel (Krishnan et al 2000), hence negatively affecting the quality of the relationship between the parties. On the other hand, it is possible that a supplier engaged in the development of a supply chain system under a time and materials contract will seek opportunities to extend the initial scope of the project by accepting the client's requests for additional functionality (Bajari and Tadelis 2001), thus improving its project revenues (Gopal and Koka 2012).…”

Productivity trends in incremental and iterative software development

“…Among other notable works, Thadhani's study [17] illustrates a unique relationship between response time, programmer skills, and program complexity, whereas Krishnan, et al, described an empirical results to link productivity and quality in terms of personnel capability, usage of tools, software process, product size, and higher front-end investments [12]. In addition to these analyses on influential factors, we've also read through other works that focus on productivity measurements such as [11], which introduces a measurement method using multiple size measures, and [3], which discusses how to apply function points on productivity measurement.…”

Properties that influence business process management maturity and its effect on organizational performance

“…This claim is supported by a large number of studies (e.g. : Jiang et al 2004;Herbsleb and Zubrow 1997;Herbsleb and Goldenson 1996;Krishnan and Kellner 1999;Krishnan and Kriebel 2000), an overview of which will be presented in Section 3. However, these studies focus on the maturity and performance of a single process or set of processes for performing a particular business function (such as software development or purchasing), while BPM studies show how the entire collection of business processes in the organization is managed in general.…”