Software productivity measurement

Productivity is a crucial concern for most organizations. This is especially true for software development organizations. Although the term productivity is widely used, the difficulty of defining it leads to serious problems in productivity measurement. This paper will attempt to survey some current productivity measures for software development organizations and discuss their deficiencies. A theoretical productivity model that overcomes these deficiencies will also be presented. A practical productivity measure that exceeds current measures by including a quality component will also be described. Although this measure is only a small improvement over contemporary measures, it is a promising step in the direction of better productivity measurement.