The increase of productivity over time—an industrial case study

Introducing new and specialized technology is often seen as a way of meeting increasing non-functional requirements. An example of such a technology is a software platform that provides high performance and availability. The novelty of such a platform and lack of related experience and competence among the staff may affect initial development productivity. The competence problems should disappear with time. In this paper, we present a study, which we conducted at Ericsson. The purpose of the study was to assess the impact of experience and maturity on productivity in software development on the specialized platform. We quantify the impact by comparing productivity of two projects. One represents an initial development stage while the other represents a subsequent and thus more matured development stage. Both projects resulted in large commercial products. We reveal a factor of four difference in productivity. The difference was caused by a higher code delivery rate and a lower number of code lines per functionality in the latter project. We assess the impact of both these issues on productivity and explain their nature. Based on our findings, we suggest a number of improvement suggestions and guidelines for the process of introducing a new technology.