Developer Productivity is a major concern for most organisations. All commercial and non-commercial organisations are increasingly dependent on software and the pace and efficiency of delivering software capabilities. Developer Productivity is a metric that determines the pace at which software innovations can be delivered, and so is developer productivity is key to organisational success.
Factors Affecting Developer Productivity
There are many factors that affect developer productivity and the impact of each varies depending on context. Below is a partial list of some of the leading factors that affect developer productivity:
- Size of the initiative
- Technical competence and experience
- Interpersonal skills
- Domain knowledge
- Focus/distractions
- Tools (including use of AI code assistants)
- Code-reuse
- Leadership engagement
- Clear requirements
- Clarity of goal
Project Size and Productivity
Project Size is one of the leading quantifiable considerations that determines developer productivity significantly. For this reason our benchmarks are grouped according to project size.
Let us first look at why this is the case. Successful software work requires close communication between users, developers, testers and other stakeholders. As a team size increases, the amount of time and effort required to communicate increases at a rate proportional to the square of the number of team members. Consider the maths of the number of lines of communication between team members is N x (N – 1) / 2
Developer productivity is affected by project size because of the cost of communication. Fortunately Project size (functional size) is measurable in a standardised and valid way. For this reason we see that the highest productivity is achieved by teams of 7 highly competent people or less.
Our Developer Productivity Benchmarks
Typical Developer ProductivityProjects of <1000 CFP |
Low Competence Hours per CFP |
Medium Competence
Hours per CFP |
High Competence Hours per CFP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Package implementation | 6 | 2 | 1 |
| Low code | 8 | 3 | 2 |
| High level language (typical) | 25 | 8 | 4 |
| Highly regulated domain | 80 | 20 | 12 |
| Low level language / firmware | 80 | 20 | 12 |
| Source: ScopeMaster Ltd | |||
This table refers to the number of developer work hours per COSMIC Function Points delivered without defect, that we have observed. These benchmarks are presented in hours per CFP. It is also legitimate to use the reciprocal of CFP per hours worked. It is also useful to look at team productivity in CFP per 2 week sprint of each team.
Although these benchmarks may be useful to you for comparison with other organisations, we recommend that you accumulate and nurture your own internal benchmarks for developer productivity and other projects dimensions.
