Analysis of Productivity of Agile versus Traditional Projects

The ISBSG repository contains more data for projects carried out in an agile way of working.  Therefore, the analysis of differences between traditional projects and agile projects becomes more significant.

The ISBSG collects industry data, where output is measured using ISO/IEC standardized, objective, repeatable, auditable methods.  These include:  Nesma, IFPUG and COSMIC function points. Typical key metrics based on function points are:

– Project Delivery Rate (PDR): which is effort spent per function point.
– Cost efficiency: Cost (or Price) per function point.
– Quality: Defects per function point (in test and/or 1st month of production).
– Speed: Function points delivered per calendar month.

The ISBSG repository ‘New Developments & Enhancements’ contains thousands of completed projects with these metrics.  This enables organizations to use this industry data for fact-based understanding and decision making.

In this short paper, the difference in productivity between traditional and agile projects is analyzed.

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