The impact of external factors on productivity in an engineering support organization

The authors explore the degree to which software engineering is actually practiced in a large computational support organization. The results reveal that practitioners generally have not adopted these techniques. This failure can be attributed primarily to the environmental conditions under which software is being developed and, in particular, to the external constraints placed on the organization. Problems created by the environment are discussed in relation to the major phases of the software life-cycle model, the sources of such problems are identified, and solutions to the problems are presented. The environmental factors impacting productivity are categorized and the findings extended to engineering support organizations in general