Relationships between Software Development Productivity and Ratio of Programming Languages

Abstract

On software development, productivity (defined by dividing software size by development effort) relates to the development cost, and therefore, it is very important for stakeholders. Many studies have tried to clarify factors affecting productivity of software development, focusing on main programing language (i.e., usage ratio of the language is the highest). However, there is no study which focuses on the usage ratio of each language, as far as we know. To enhance the accuracy of productivity analysis, we analyzed productivity factors, considering the usage ratio of programming languages. We analyzed 450 software projects collected from cross companies, and the result suggests that development effort is decreased by 33%, when the usage ratio of MS-ACCESS is 100%.