Productivity Impacts of Software Complexity and Developer Experience
Geoffrey K. Gill, Chris F. Kemerer · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2011
The high costs of developing and maintaining software have become widely recognized as major obstacles to the continued successful use of information technology.Unfortunately, against this backdrop of high and rising costs stands only a hmited amount of research in measuring software development productivity and m understanding the effect of software complexity on variations in productivity.The current research is an in-depth study of a number of software development projects undertaken by an aerospace defense contracting firm in the late 1980s.These data allow for the analysis of the impact of software complexity and of varying levels of staff expertise on both new development and maintenance.In terms of the main research questions, the data support the notion that more complex systems, as measured by size-adjusted McCabe cyclomatic complexity, require more effort to maintain.For this data set, the Myers and Hansen variations were found to be essentially equivalent to the original McCabe specification.Software engineers with more experience were more productive, but this labor production input factor revealed declining marginal returns to experience.The average net marginal impact of additional experience (minus its higher cost) was positive.