An Approach to Measure Value-Based Productivity in Software Projects

Nowadays, after a lot of evolution in software engineering area, there is not yet a simple and direct answer to the question: What is the best software productivity metric? The simplest and most commonly used metric is the SLOC and its derivations, but these are admittedly problematic for this purpose. In another way, there are some indications of maturation in this topic, the new studies point to the use of more labored models, which are based on multiple dimensions and in the idea of produced value. Based in this tendency and on the evidence that each organization must define its own way to assess their productivity, we defined a process to support the definition of productivity measurement models in software organizations. We also discuss, in this paper, some issues about the difficulties related with the process adoption in real software organizations.