Productivity and Quality in Selecting Software Development Practices
Alan MacCormack, Chris F. Kemerer, Michael A. Cusumano · 2003
complement the waterfall model, others ap-pear to contradict its main principles. Further-more, the performance dimensions that eachpractice seeks to optimize often differ. Unfor-tunately, these potential conflicts are difficultto resolve because the data presented to sup-port most models is anecdotal and biased to-ward reporting only successful projects.Our objective here is to look at how certainpractices, proposed by various developmentmodels, affect performance. By exploring dif-ferent practices’ associations with multiple di-mensions of performance across a number ofprojects, we examine the trade-offs involved indesigning a process to optimize specific per-formance criteria. We carefully selected thepractices for investigation to explore some ofthe potential conflicts that arise between dif-ferent development models.