As reported in ComputerWorld, April 28, 1997, www.computerworld.com
| The constant need to learn new technology is taking a heavy
toll on developers' productivity.
That's the conclusion of Meta Croup, Inc.'s Software Engineering Productivity Strategy Service, which estimates that the productivity of American developers was cut almost in half last year. Those depressing figures are based on surveys of 404 companies worldwide. The polling was conducted by Rubin Systems, Inc. in Pound Ridge, N.Y., says Malcolm Slovin, a vice president and service director at Meta Croup. Lines of code per programmer fell from 7,500 in 1994 to 6,900 in 1995 and then plunged to 3,540 last year, Slovin says. When measured by function points, the pattern was similar: American developers produced an average of 96 function points in 1994, 88 in 1995 and only 41.7 last year. Slovin says productivity is down because developers, particularly in the US., are spending more time learning new technologies and trying to solve their organizations' year 2000 problems. |
One bright spot: "Quality went up significantly in the U.S.," Slovin
says. It fell from 2.3 defects per 1,000 lines of code in 1995 to 1.15 defects
per 1,000 lines last year.
Tom Kaminski says he's seen the productivity drop firsthand at Career Systems Development Corp. in Rochester, N.Y., which manages training programs for government agencies. Kaminski, the company's director of information systems, says productivity has declined because of the learning needed to change "our development platforms from character-based systems to Windows-based systems." His IS organization also is investing time and money to come up with standard development processes to improve quality in the long run. But this investment means delaying the conversion of some applications from character based applications to newer, graphical platforms, he says. Robert L. Scheier |