Some basic determinants of computer programming productivity

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Some basic determinants of computer programming productivity

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Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 21 , Issue 6 (June 1978) table of contents

Pages: 472 - 483

Year of Publication: 1978

ISSN:0001-0782

Author

Earl Chrysler

Univ. of Wisconsin-Parkside, Kenosha

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 7, Downloads (12 Months): 55, Citation Count: 14

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abstract references cited by index terms collaborative colleagues

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ABSTRACT

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between processing characteristics of programs and experience characteristics of programmers and program development time. The ultimate objective was to develop a technique for predicting the amount of time necessary to create a computer program. The fifteen program characteristics hypothesized as being associated with an increase in programming time required are objectively measurable from preprogramming specifications. The five programmer characteristics are experience-related and are also measurable before a programming task is begun. Nine program characteristics emerged as major influences on program development time, each associated with increased program development time. All five programmer characteristics were found to be related to reduced program development time. A multiple regression equation which contained one programmer characteristic and four program characteristics gave evidence of good predictive power for forecasting program development time.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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CITED BY 14

	D. R. Jeffery , M. J. Lawrence, An inter-organisational comparison of programming productivity, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Software engineering, p.369-377, September 17-19, 1979, Munich, Germany
	D. R. Jeffery , V. R. Basili, Validating the TAME resource data model, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Software engineering, p.187-201, April 11-15, 1988, Singapore
	Paul S. Licker, The Japanese approach: a better way to manage programmers?, Communications of the ACM, v.26 n.9, p.631-636, Sept. 1983
	John Leslie King, Centralized versus decentralized computing: organizational considerations and management options, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.15 n.4, p.319-349, December 1983
	J. H. Morrissey , L. S.-Y. Wu, Software engineering...an economic perspective, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Software engineering, p.412-422, September 17-19, 1979, Munich, Germany
	Thomas Moher , G. Michael Schneider, Methods for improving controlled experimentation in software engineering, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Software engineering, p.224-233, March 09-12, 1981, San Diego, California, United States
	Donald R. Chand , Raghava G. Gowda, An exploration of the impact of individual and group factors on programmer productivity, Proceedings of the 1993 ACM conference on Computer science, p.338-345, February 16-18, 1993, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
	Robert Klepper , Douglas Bock, Third and fourth generation language productivity differences, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.9, p.69-79, Sept. 1995
	F. Hattori , K. Kushima , T. Wasano, A comparison of Lisp, Prolog, and Ada programming productivity in AI area, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Software engineering, p.285-291, August 28-30, 1985, London, England
	Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid, The Dynamics of Software Project Staffing: A System Dynamics Based Simulation Approach, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.15 n.2, p.109-119, February 1989
	Parag C. Pendharkar , Girish H. Subramanian , James A. Rodger, A Probabilistic Model for Predicting Software Development Effort, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.31 n.7, p.615-624, July 2005
	Dana T. Edberg , Brent J. Bowman, User-developed applications: an empirical study of application quality and developer productivity, Journal of Management Information Systems, v.13 n.1, p.167-185, June 1996
	Ned Chapin, Productivity in software maintenance, Proceedings of the May 4-7, 1981, national computer conference, May 04-07, 1981, Chicago, Illinois
	Linda Brice , John Connell, A methodology for minimizing maintenance costs, Proceedings of the May 16-19, 1983, national computer conference, May 16-19, 1983, Anaheim, California