How have Software Engineering Researchers been Measuring Software Productivity? - A Systematic Mapping Study

Edson Oliveira, Davi Viana, Marco Cristo, Tayana Conte

2017

Abstract

Context: productivity has been a recurring topic, and despite its importance, researchers have not yet reached a consensus on how to properly measure productivity in software engineering. Aim: to investigate and better understand how software productivity researchers are using software productivity metrics. Method: we performed a systematic mapping study on publications regarding software productivity, extracting how software engineering researchers are measuring software productivity. Results: In a total of 91 software productivity metrics were extracted. The obtained results show that researchers apply these productivity metrics mainly focusing on software projects and developers, and these productivity metrics are predominantly composed by Lines of Code (LOC), Time and Effort measures. Conclusion: although there is no consensus, our results shows that single ratio metrics, such as LOC/Effort, for software projects, and LOC/Time, for software developers, are a tendency adopted by researchers to measure productivity.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Oliveira E., Viana D., Cristo M. and Conte T. (2017). How have Software Engineering Researchers been Measuring Software Productivity? - A Systematic Mapping Study . In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-248-6, pages 76-87. DOI: 10.5220/0006314400760087


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis17,
author={Edson Oliveira and Davi Viana and Marco Cristo and Tayana Conte},
title={How have Software Engineering Researchers been Measuring Software Productivity? - A Systematic Mapping Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,},
year={2017},
pages={76-87},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006314400760087},
isbn={978-989-758-248-6},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS,
TI - How have Software Engineering Researchers been Measuring Software Productivity? - A Systematic Mapping Study
SN - 978-989-758-248-6
AU - Oliveira E.
AU - Viana D.
AU - Cristo M.
AU - Conte T.
PY - 2017
SP - 76
EP - 87
DO - 10.5220/0006314400760087