Productivity is an important topic investigated in disciplines as various as manufacturing, organizational psychology, industrial engineering, strategic management, finance, accounting, marketing and economics.
[1] Due to this diversity, there is no clear-cut definition of productivity and its influencing factors, although research has been conducted for more than a century.
However, the research communities in neither discipline have been able to establish broadly applicable and accepted means for productivity measurement yet.
The term performance is even broader than productivity and profitability and covers a plethora of factors that influence a company's success.
Hence, well-known performance controlling instruments like the Balanced Scorecard do include productivity as a factor that is central but not unique.
While there are numerous other definitions,[3] there is a certain agreement that efficiency refers to the utilisation of resources and mainly influences the required input of the productivity ratio.
Effectiveness on the other hand mainly influences the output of the productivity ratio as it usually has direct consequences for the customer.
"[3] However, most of the classic literature in non-software disciplines, especially in the manufacturing area, does not explicitly discuss the role of quality of the output in the productivity ratio.
In this model, he defines a set of factors that influence productivity, such as the required reliability or the capability of the analysts.
Besides several theoretical considerations his main contribution is the systematic provision and integration of a large amount of data relevant for productivity analyses.
Boehm and Huang point out that is it not only important to track the costs in a software project but also the real earned value, i.e. the value for the customer.
The famous book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by de Marco and Lister[14] brought the importance of people-related factors to the attention of a broader audience.
They collected in many software projects experiences with good and bad management practice that have an influence on the productivity of the team.
[15] In 2007, the xkcd comic popularized the concept of a Ballmer Peak—that a programmer, with just the right amount of inebriation, achieves a high state of productivity.