Factors Affecting Productivity In Software Module Development And Measures To Improve It

1 Briefly describe your selected project and an appropriate, effort-driven task selected from that project. Explain the resources (human) that are required for the selected task

2 Define productivity (in the context of project work) and define worker productivity and state how these can be measured. Explain how the productivity of your selected project task could be effectively measured. 

3 Describe three factors that may significantly affect the productivity of the workers for your selected project task and explain in what way and by how much these factors could influence the estimate of the work duration of that task. 

4 Describe one management technique, appropriate to your nominated project and task, which addresses one or more of the factors described above (in Step 3); and which could be implemented on your chosen task to improve the worker productivity. Explain how you would expect the productivity of the work (and hence the task duration) to be impacted by this technique.

Selected Project: Software Module Development

This paper intends to discuss the project of software module development and the productivity of the labor assigned to this task. It would provide a detailed description of the selected project of software module development and the resources required for the task. It would describe the productivity in context to project and the process for measuring the productivity in the software development module project (Braglia, Marcello and Marco Frosolini 2014). The paper would provide three factors that effect the productivity of the worker in this project and relevant management technique which is appropriate for the project. Therefore it can be concluded that this report would be effective in meeting all the requirements.

 The selected project for this paper is Software Module Development, and it would consider the effort driven by the employees in the completion of this project. The project of the productivity of software module depends on the value of software produced and the labors and expenses involved in it. The various tasks involved in software module development are planning, designing, documentation, implementation and software engineering and data modelling (Davenport and Thomas 2015). The effort-driven task selected from the project of software module development is implementation and software engineering.  The resources required for the project of developing software development are programmers and graphic designers for creating the front end.

The productivity is defined as the ratio between the number of services or goods produced and the number of the labor or expenses required for producing them. In the context of this project work, the productivity would be the ratio of the amount of software module developed by the company and amount of resources such as software developer and graphic designers involved in the project. The worker productivity cannot be measured in the simple pages or units as they are measured in terms of the program functionality, and they cannot be quantified (Benner, Mary and Tushman 2015). The metrics required for measuring the productivity in the case of the software module development are efforts of the software developers and relevant workers and the functionality in the software module provided to the consumers. The methods implemented for measuring productivity are as follows.

Function Pont Analysis Method: In this method, the functional point value is obtained by considering five parameters such as internal logical files, external interface, external input, external output and enquiries. The set of complexity ratings ranging from low to very high is assigned to this parameters for the ease of calculation (Colomo-Palacios et al. 2015).

Measuring Productivity in Software Module Development

Constructive Cost Method: It is also known as COCOMO model, and it measures the effort required for the constructive approach.

Cyclomatic Complexity: This method uses the concept of graph theory to explain the quantity of linearly independent paths of the module of the software.

The three factors affecting the productivity of the worker in developing the software module can be explained as follows.

The resources are the most important factor affecting the productivity of the employee. It can affect the employee productivity in both the positive and negative manner. The insufficient resources for the development of software module can have an impact on the productivity and attitude of the employee. The resources here are not only confined to the materials, supplies and software. The resources can be training programs for the employees in order to develop new and required skills for developing the software module (Alias et al. 2014). In order to meet the goals of the organization and the successful completion of the project assigned, there is a need to allocate the adequate resources to the relevant employee. It is important to assess the need for training for the employee at the initial stages of the project so that the resources can be efficiently provided. The attitude of the employee can be affected in a positive manner by providing them with mentors who can solve their issues (Jackson and Kirabo 2013). It can affect the estimate of the time required for developing the software module to a little extent as the employee can be interested in project although there is a lack of resources.

The employee would be able to provide the appropriate software module as a result of the project only if the employee or the group of employee are satisfied with their job. It might happen that an employee is not interested or skilled for a specific project and including such an employee in the project might have a bad effect on the productivity. The relevant factors that can affect the productivity are working condition, level of responsibility, supervision level and policies of the organization (Rezvani et al. 2016). The positive attitude of an employee can affect the productivity to a great extent. For instance, providing the resources to the employee means nothing until they have an attitude to learn new skills and implement them for increasing the quality and quantity of their productivity. The attitude of an employee is infectious to the whole organization. This factor can affect the estimate of the work duration of developing the software module by a long time period as the employee is not motivated about the work from the initial stages of the project. It also affects the quality of the produced software module to a great extent, and the reason is an unskilled or less interested employee (Mir, Farzana and Ashly 2014).

Factors Affecting Productivity

The tool of trade is an important factor that affects the productivity of the employees. The organization must be capable of providing the required tools for performing the work before assessing the productivity of the employee. The productivity is directly proportional to the availability of the latest tools and software required for developing the software module (Carley et al. 2014). It is important to ensure that the network of the organization can handle the traffic due to a large number of users. The use of network by large number of the member can slow down the functioning of software developer and the graphic designer.  

The management technique that would be appropriate for the software module development project is Waterfall technique. It can provide the capability to address the factors responsible for the productivity of the worker as described in the above section.

The waterfall management is one of the oldest technique of project management which is widely implemented in the software development. It is utilized in the various IT project management. The concerned project for this paper is software module development, and the waterfall technique is very suitable for this project. It follows the sequential methods for working (Serrador, Pedro and Jeffrey 2015). A sequence is formed for all the operations such as planning and development, testing and analyzing the quality and the maintenance of the project. The sequence of the task is provided with estimation of time for each task. The Gantt chart is alternatively used for making the sequence and the estimation. This plan is not altered often, and it is strictly followed to achieve the goals of the project. It tends to be amid the flexible and less iterative approaches, and the flow of the approach is in one direction.  

The management technique which can be implemented to increase the productivity of the worker in the project of the software module development is critical chain methodology. The most of the predictable approaches of project management use the time estimation which is more than the required estimation. The technique of critical chain methodology uses the time estimation which is half of the required time (Hornstein and Henry 2015). The fundamental constituents of the project are called the critical chain and the relevant methodology guarantees that the maximum required resources are assigned to this critical chain. It also ensures that the other chains have got adequate resources too. In the above task, it is explained that the productivity of the selected project is dependent on the allocation of resources and thus this method this effective in the context of the selected project. The three buffers are used by this methodology in order to allocate resources and time efficiently.

Appropriate Management Technique

Project buffer: It is static between the project completion date and the last task. In the case of critical chain delay, they can utilize this buffer.

Feeding buffer: It is fixed between the first critical task and the last non-critical task. It is done to ensure that the critical task is not affected by the delays during non-critical tasks.

 Resource buffer: In order to confirm that the work in the critical chain has sufficient properties to complete the task. The resource buffers are said to be fixed with the critical chain tasks (?lusarczyk, Anna  and Dorota 2013).

Conclusion

 It can be concluded that this paper is efficient in providing the detailed description of the management and productivity of worker in developing the project of the software module. The paper effectively discusses the resources required for this project and the productivity of the employee and measurement scheme. The employee for this specific project is the software developer and the graphic designers. It provides the three factors that affect the productivity as resources, job satisfaction and availability of tools of the trade. It provides the management technique of Waterfall and critical chain technology as the recommendation for increasing productivity. Thus it can be concluded that the paper provides an effective approach to the topic.  

References

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