An Investigation of Software Development Productivity in China
Software productivity conveys fundamental information for many decision making processes, such as in-house development benchmarking and outsourcing strategic planning. However, there is a lack of statistical results on this matter with respect to Chinese
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Laboratory for Internet Software Technologies, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China {hemei,mingshu,wq,ye,yekai}@itechs.iscas.ac.cn 2 Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039 China 3 State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China
Abstract. Software productivity conveys fundamental information for many decision making processes, such as in-house development benchmarking and outsourcing strategic planning. However, there is a lack of statistical results on this matter with respect to Chinese software industry. In this paper, through the analysis of 999 industry projects in China, we seek to develop in-depth and comprehensive understanding about software productivity status in China, by identifying significant influential factors and examining their true effects based on our dataset. As a result, Organization is identified as the most significant factor, followed by Development type, Business area, Region, Language, Project size and Team size. Further assessment and findings are also presented with relevant recommendations to increase productivity and improve software processes. Keywords: Software productivity, empirical analysis, Chinese software industry, globalization of software development, software process improvement.
1 Introduction New types of software processes such as IT outsourcing and globally distributed development have become widely adopted practices. A successful outsourcing approach requires a systematical consideration and management of many critical factors such as people factors, process factors, product factors, etc. Among these, it is believed that software productivity study provides the most insights to help organizations seeking for a beneficial outsourcing option. On the other hand, software industry in China has been experiencing great-leapforward development resulting from this global outsourcing paradigm. As a result, software export value has increased from 3.3 billion RMB in 2000 to 46.8 billion RMB in 2006. An 8-year longitude analysis of the industry size is shown in Fig. 1 *
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60573082; the National Hi-Tech R&D Plan of China under Grant Nos. 2006AA01Z182 and 2007AA010303; the National Basic Research Program (973 program) under Grant No. 2007CB310802.
Q. Wang, D. Pfahl, and D.M. Raffo (Eds.): ICSP 2008, LNCS 5007, pp. 381 – 394, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
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[1-3]. Meanwhile, Chinese software industry is also facing a great deal of challenges, such as scalability difficulty, lack of core technology advance, lack of top-level personnel, and management policy mismatch [3]. During the development course of The Siz e of Software Industry in C hina its software industry, China also (Billion RMB) grows into one of the major outsourc600 480 500 ing service bases. However, there is 390 400 278 lack of comprehensive studies on 300 163.3
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