Complexity metrics and customer involvement in software development: Implications for managing productivity and quality

Often, we find that software development is plagued by schedule and cost estimates that are grossly inaccurate, software that is of poor quality, and development productivity that is increasing at a slower rate than the demand for software. This situation has often been termed as the "software crisis". This dissertation is composed of three self-contained essays that throws light on some problems related to the software crisis. They address relationships among measures of design complexity in software, conformance quality of the developed software, and innovative process changes such as customer involvement that enable managers and software developers to cope with development challenges. Each essay involves an independent field study in a real-world corporate setting.; In the first essay, the primary relationship of interest is the role of design complexity metrics on the quality of the software. We study several hundred modules in a hierarchical structure (created using the object-oriented analysis and design technique) and analyze the link between design complexity metrics in such a setting and conformance quality measured as defects found in modules after development. We find evidence for the relationship between several measures of design complexity and defects.; In the second essay, we propose metrics that better represent design complexity in development environments where construction of the software application is through assembly of pre-built modules (components) as opposed to traditional development settings where most modules of an information system are build afresh and in-house. Utilizing data gathered from a field setting, this analysis examines relationships among the proposed design complexity measures, the actual development effort expended in the development of the product, and quality of the end product.; While the first and second essay address the product aspect of software development, the third essay focuses on the process aspect. Specifically, we explore the implications of development practices that entail customer involvement, such as activities that help control product-scope and activities that promote iterative customer-team feedback mechanisms, on the productivity and development time of software projects. Through detailed empirical analyses in a field setting, we find that evidence for constructive as well as disruptive influence of customer involvement.