Book Series "Increasing Productivity in Software Development"

The PASS Group has been using key figures as the basis for its IT management in more than 10 different application landscapes with more than 500 customers and over 250,000 users for several years and is now publishing its experiences in the form of a series of books. In some areas, the regularly collected key figures demonstrate a 100-fold increase in delivery productivity compared to just a few years ago and they show in which areas further improvements are possible.


Why measure productivity?

IT has already changed almost all areas of life through fundamental innovations. Our future will be dominated by virtualization and smart helpers, i.e. things equipped with intelligence. Software is the stuff of innovation. Software development is a key competence.

Productivity and quality are critical success factors for companies developing software. Only with suitable measuring methods, regular measurements and rapid feedback of the measured values to the team and its management can the effort of planned developments be reliably determined and productivity and quality be continuously improved.

Part 1: "Productivity and Performance Measurement - Measurability and Methods"

Book Series "Increasing Productivity in Software Development"

The first book in the series first explains a practicable definition of productivity for software development and thus shows the conditions under which productivity can be measured at all. It describes the ISO/IEC 14143 standard as an important common basis for all modern function-oriented measurement methods. Some methods are explained in detail and compared with their advantages and disadvantages on the basis of practical examples - tried and tested as well as new ones. The book deals with the automatability of measurements, but also points out their limits, the exceeding of which leads to invalidity measurements due to a strong orientation towards design features instead of application cases.

Another topic is the influence of complexity on the scope to be measured, the different consideration of complexity through different measurement methods and the limits of measurability through function-oriented metrics, for example in systems with above-average algorithmic complexity.

Part 2: "Management Model, Cost Estimation and KPI Improvement"

The second book describes a model based on three key performance indicators (KPIs): Productivity (measured using the measurement methods described in the first book), cost and quality. It explains its cyclical survey, analytical evaluation and indicators, for example by comparing productivity and quality over time or as a result of methodological analyses of the causes of errors, which lead to improvement measures in important areas of influence in software development, so-called key performance areas (KPAs). In order to be able to assess the benefits of the measures in advance, it provides empirical values as well as a method for calculating their effectiveness. The model described is a navigation tool that always shows management in which direction and at what speed it moves with regard to its three KPIs.

The books are available as e-book, paperback and hardcover (in the PASS book shop or at Amazon.com).