New Factors Affecting Productivity of the Software Factory

Abstract

Productivity is very important because it allows organizations to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in their activities; however, it is affected by numerous factors. While these factors have been identified for over two decades, all of the previous works limited the software factory to the programming work unit and did not analyze other work units that are also relevant. 90% of a software factory's effort is absorbed by the software production component, 85% of which is concentrated in the efforts of the analysis and design, programming, and testing work units. The present work identifies three new factors that influence the software factory, demonstrating that the use of rules and events influences analysis & design, team heterogeneity negatively affects analysis and design and positively affects programming; and the osmotic communication affects programming. An empirical study on software factories in Peru, determined that 95% of the influence came from these factors, which corroborated as well that team size and trust within the team influences in software production.