Equations for Efficiency

Over 21 years of developing software ourselves and assisting other organizations to deliver better software faster, Parasoft has determined that improving software development productivity really boils down to the following equations:

• Having a clear, actionable plan of attack = Productivity
  
• Increasing code knowledge = Productivity
  
• Reducing rework = Productivity
  
• Reducing debugging = Productivity
  

In fact, these ideas are not so novel. Other industries have struggled with the same types of productivity issues that the software development industry is facing today, and enjoyed tremendous success by adopting the same core approaches. By applying them in our own industry, we can bring software development productivity to more rewarding and competitive levels.

In our experience, we have found that applying the following equations leads to astonishing increases in productivity. For instance, applying them internally at Parasoft enables us to have 120 developers working on 48 million lines of code. This works out to about 400,000 LOC per developer, which is significantly more than the “10,000-20,000 LOC per developer” industry average referenced in my previous post.