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An inter-organisational comparison of programming productivity

Published: 17 September 1979 Publication History

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.

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Chrysler, E. "The impact of program and programmer characteristics on program size", AFIPS, National Computer Conference, 1978, 581-587.
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Davis, G.B., Olson, M.H. & Litecky, C.R., Elementary Structured COBOL, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1977.
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Cited By

View all
  • (1989)Scale Economies in New Software DevelopmentIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.1989.55976815:10(1199-1205)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1989
  • (1988)Validating the TAME resource data modelProceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering10.5555/55823.55843(187-201)Online publication date: 1-Apr-1988
  • (1985)A comparison of Lisp, Prolog, and Ada programming productivity in AI areaProceedings of the 8th international conference on Software engineering10.5555/319568.319655(285-291)Online publication date: 1-Aug-1985

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '79: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Software engineering
September 1979
466 pages

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IEEE Press

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Published: 17 September 1979

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Cited By

View all
  • (1989)Scale Economies in New Software DevelopmentIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.1989.55976815:10(1199-1205)Online publication date: 1-Oct-1989
  • (1988)Validating the TAME resource data modelProceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering10.5555/55823.55843(187-201)Online publication date: 1-Apr-1988
  • (1985)A comparison of Lisp, Prolog, and Ada programming productivity in AI areaProceedings of the 8th international conference on Software engineering10.5555/319568.319655(285-291)Online publication date: 1-Aug-1985

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