An inter-organisational comparison of programming productivity
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TL;DR
The best determinant of program development time was found to be procedure division lines of code, which gave a simple regression R2 in excess of .79 for the two organisations using well formulated programming standards.
Abstract
The factors which influence program size and program development time have been investigated across three dissimilar organisations. Data on a total of 93 COBOL programs has been collected and analysed. Eighteen variables covering the characteristics of the program, programmer and programming environment were recorded. Program size and program development time were found to have a strong program characteristic and organisation dependency. Programmer characteristics did not appear to play a role in influencing program size or program development time. The best determinant of program development time was found to be procedure division lines of code, which gave a simple regression R2 in excess of .79 for the two organisations using well formulated programming standards. Productivity measures based on lines of code per hour are shown to be misleading in inter-organisational comparisons.