Premium
A Performance Measure for Software Reuse Projects
Author(s) -
Rothenberger Marcus A.,
Dooley Kevin J.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
decision sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.238
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1540-5915
pISSN - 0011-7315
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5915.1999.tb00921.x
Subject(s) - reuse , computer science , software development , productivity , measure (data warehouse) , software , quality (philosophy) , code reuse , software quality , software project management , team software process , process management , software engineering , software development process , software construction , business , database , engineering , operating system , philosophy , epistemology , waste management , economics , macroeconomics
The efficient development of software has become a critical factor to the success of many organizations. Significant competitive advantage can be realized by reducing the time to complete software development, while maintaining or improving quality levels. Project management activities, including the measurement of performance at the level of the project, can help the organization to both control projects and learn from experience. Traditionally, the productivity of a software development project has been measured as the complexity of code produced per unit of labor involved. An increasing number of organizations, however, are adopting the practice of software reuse, and under such conditions, such a traditional measure of productivity does not fully capture all the relevant elements of the reuse‐driven development environment. This research develops a new performance measure that considers four major components of performance: productivity associated with development of new code, productivity associated with the reuse of previously written code, quality of the reuse decision, and relative value of reuse to the company. To illustrate the feasibility of the measure, a real‐world productivity assessment is presented for an example company, and related implementation issues are discussed.