Software Productivity -- Bad News and Good News

by Ken Orr

First, the bad news: a month or two ago, I was talking to one of my good friends, who also happens to be one of the world's great students of software productivity. I asked him why it was that there was very little discussion in the press about software productivity. His response was that, from his data, there hadn't been very much improvement over the last decade or so. He said that probably three-fourths of the organizations he'd studied hadn't improved very much, if at all. Of the other 25% or so, roughly half had increased their productivity and the other half had actually decreased theirs. I found this intriguing but not very surprising, considering some of the development organizations that I've encountered over the last few years. My friend suggested that the most likely reason for this lack of productivity increase was the dramatic increase in software complexity.