Measures for optimizing Productivity

From experience the productivity of software development is affected by the following key areas - in different intensity and without any claim to comprehensiveness:

• Knowledge and experiences of the involved staff

• Their motivation, especially the willingness to increase productivity

• Knowledge management, i.e. the ability to make the required knowledge available for staff at the right time

• Risk management, i.e. the ability to anticipate negative influences on productivity and to take countermeasures prematurely

• Constructive quality assurance, e.g. by predefined processes, methods, guidelines which give process security, or by standards and reusable components, which help reducing development and testing efforts

• Automation, e.g. code generation in the area of implementation and test automation in the area of analytical qa. Automated testing reduces the test effort, at the same time it increases the reliability of test results and by early and continuous tests it enables quality improvements (see: Are Quality Improvements always reducing the Productivity?).

In these areas it is worthwhile to look out for improvement measures.