11 Resource measurement: Productivity, teams and tools


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11.3 The meaning of productivity, cont.

Measures of quality and size do not capture information about the quality and utility of software; and thus neither the productivity measures treated so far. These could be complemented with quality measures discussed in the chapters 8-10, see Example 11.3.

For other personnel, like project managers, test teams etc. it is not clear what the output is and then measuring productivity may not possible.

11.4 Teams, tools, and methods

Rook draws an analogy between the benefits of certain structural attributes of software products and that of development and management teams, see Table 11.6.

Measures of team communication structures are exemplified in Figure 11.2.

An ordinal measure of personnel experience could be:

  1. No previous experience
  2. Familiarity but no working experience
  3. Working experience on a single project (< 21 h)
  4. Working experience on several projects ( 21 - 100 h)
  5. Thoroughly experienced
For teams the median of the experience mesure of individual members can be used.

The COCOMO model includes cost drivers for use of tools and use of methods, see Tables 11.7 and 11.8. The central column describes the increase in project effort (1.08 means 8 % increase). Observe that the scale rather should be ratio or interval instead of nominal.