What is the expected effect of Use of Tools on Software Productivity?

Research Question

Main question:
What evidence is there for the accuracy/usefulness of the prediction and measurement methods?

Secondary Questions:
1) Is there any measurement that can support  prediction and measurement methods? If so, is it always true for different software processes?

2) Which factors (or drivers or constructs) have been used to define/compose/describe such prediction and measurement  methods?

Search String

(("software process" OR "software development" OR "software engineering processes" OR "business information system" OR "software maintenance" OR "software project" OR "open source project" OR "OSS project") AND (productivity OR efficiency OR "process performance" OR "development performance" OR "software performance" OR "project performance" OR "prediction method" OR "measurement method") AND (measure OR metric OR model OR predict OR estimate OR measurement OR estimation OR prediction) AND (empirical OR validation OR evaluation OR experiment OR example OR simulation OR analysis OR study OR interview))

Inclusion Criteria

• To talk about: Performance, productivity or efficiency of software development, software processes, software projects, software developers, or; Relations between different direct measurements or attributes (like size and effort, or reliability and effort, lead-time and resources, or multivariate relations) that are used to characterize the performance, productivity or efficiency of software development, software processes, software projects or software developers. Proof of concept, experiment, case study, example or other empirical research methods to show its applicability and usefulness/accuracy. It is also reasonable to consider papers that are based on real-world data from software repositories.

Exclusion Criteria

• Productivicty (efficiency) measurement and prediction is not the main focus. Talking about direct measures that are not combined with other measures and thus no claims regarding productivity, efficiency and performance are possible. The synthesis of evidence is based on the primary studies identified by the search. The secondary studies are excluded from the actual synthesis and results. Talking about measures for single techniques, which do not give an indication how well organizations or teams performs on the overall process level or within a development phase. Studies that have not evaluated a solution (be it in an experiment, proof of concept, or a case study) shall be excluded.

• Software Development Productivity of European Space, Military, and Industrial Applications
• Benchmarking software development productivity
• An analysis of trends in productivity and cost drivers over years
• Maximising productivity by controlling influencing factors in commercial software development

• An analysis of trends in productivity and cost drivers over years
• Study Type : Observational
• Quality evaluation
• Evidence
• Benchmarking software development productivity
• Study Type : Observational
• Quality evaluation
• Evidence
• Software Development Productivity of European Space, Military, and Industrial Applications
• Study Type : Observational
• Quality evaluation
• Evidence
• Maximising productivity by controlling influencing factors in commercial software development
• Study Type : Observational
• Quality evaluation
• Evidence

• Use of Tools affecting Software Productivty
• Evidence based on the paper "Software Development Productivity of European Space, Military, and Industrial Applications"
• Evidence based on the paper "Benchmarking software development productivity"
• Evidence based on the paper "Maximising productivity by controlling influencing factors in commercial software development"
• Evidence based on the paper "An analysis of trends in productivity and cost drivers over years"
• Result

Research question

The aggregated evidence refers to research question about which factors have been used to define/compose/describe software productivity in prediction and measurement methods.

Use of Tools affecting Software Productivty

The purpose of this synthesis is to characterize the effect of Use of Tools on software productivity from the point of view of SE researchers in the context of factors described/identified in productivity prediction and measurement methods. This new and aggregated evidence shows that Use of Tools has a weakly positive or positive effect on software productivity (belief =49%). Nevertheless, the probability of conflict of evidence is 28%. Thus, this result must be cautiously used. 

 We have adopted the following criteria: Whenever the probability of a effect is less than 70%, this effect have to be studied more extensively and have more studies investigating it.