A quantitative analysis of U.S. and Japanese software-engineering practice and performance

Since the early 1980s, there has been a mounting debate in industry literature and in U.S. government-sponsored reports over the relative performance of software developers in Japan versus those in the United States. This literature is divided between assertions of Japanese or U.S. superiority in this technology. However, both sides of the debate have offered evidence that, to date, has been primarily qualitative or based on one or two cases. This paper contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it offers a comprehensive literature review that analyzes existing comparisons of Japanese and U.S. firms in software development and summarizes the major proposed differences in performance. Second, it presents the first set of quantitative data collected from a statistically comparable sample of 24 U.S. and 16 Japanese software-development projects, and uses these data to test propositions from the literature. The analyses indicate that Japanese programmers perform at least as well as their U.S. counterparts in basic measures of productivity, quality (defects), and reuse of software code. The data also make it possible to offer models that explain some of the differences in productivity and quality.