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

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 total, 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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