Part II: Team Size and Productivity

Posted By Kate Armel on Tue, 2010-04-13 22:03

<< SLIM-Estimate and IBM Rational Focal... | Main | Part III: How Does Duration Affect... >>

In Part I of this series, we demonstrated that average productivity (effective size/effort) increases with project size. This relationship holds true across the size spectrum whether we’re talking about projects in the very small range or projects that deliver a million lines of code. Above this cutoff, the sample size is too small to be definitive.

But productivity isn't the only metric that increases with project size. On average, large projects use more effort, take longer, and use bigger teams.  How can these results be reconciled with previous studies which conclude that the large team strategy results in lower productivity? It would seem that we have a contradiction on our hands.

 

Related Posts

Back to Main Blog

Comments

---

FP

Posted by on Fri, 2011-02-04 11:05

It does apply equally well to FP.  If you look at the productivity tables, you can see that FP has the same relationship as ESLOC.

And, the primary size metric is Efffective SLOC, which can be thought of as a placeholder for a common amount of size.  I could have just as well used "implementation units" instead of ESLOC.

Paul Below

---

SLOC or other Size Measures

Posted by on Tue, 2010-06-08 11:05

Paul,

First - thank you so much for sharing this with the rest of the world. Always great to see data set being used to try to answer some questions...

Now - Question... Have you tried to see if your conclussion only relates to SLOC - or if your conclussion could relate to size measures such as FP?

Best Regards,

Christine