An Empirical Study of Learning Curve Theory's application to the Software Development Effort-Experience Relationship in Software Engineering and Project Management
Parag C. Pendharkar, Girish H. Subramanian · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2004
The experience of software developers in a given tool is often perceived as an endogenous factor in software cost estimation.Many manufacturing applications have modeled resources devoted to output production, and worker's knowledge as learning curves.In this paper, we use and test the learning curve theory in software industry.We illustrate that a programmer's effort exponentially decreases as his/her tool experience increases.After certain amount of tool-experience, the effort reduction asymptotically stabilizes.We believe that the learning curve theory and its application provide an excellent opportunity for IT project managers to better utilize the experience of their software personnel.