Productivity Benchmarking: Methods and Lessons Learned
Abstract: Productivity benchmarking allows software development projects and organizations to compare themselves to the market place in a given sector of industry. However, in practice benchmarking presents many difficulties such as identifying a meaningful basis of comparison. The European Space Agency (ESA) outsources many software projects. They have accumulated a large cost database from these projects. In this paper, we present a method for productivity benchmarking, as well as the productivity benchmarks we derived for one of our customers based on the ESA database. Furthermore, we provide usage scenarios for these models by describing how these models can be practically applied for benchmarking purposes.
Introduction: In the past, the word “benchmark” has been used in various ways. In this paper, we define productivity benchmarks as instruments that allow an organization/project to compare its productivity to those of other similar organizations/projects. The ability to benchmark the productivity of their projects provides software organisations a number of advantages. These include the ability to determine whether they are competitive in a given business sector, and whether a significant productivity improvement is required for sustaining a particular business..
Click here to read more on Productivity Benchmarking: Methods and Lessons Learned
