Trade-offs between productivity and quality in selecting software development practices

Given software's important role in business, the design of effective development processes has received great attention. Early attempts at standardizing a formal software development model culminated in what's now known as the waterfall model. Over time, this view of software development as a process that could be managed proactively led to the development of other models, each proposing improvements. However, although some of the practices in these newer models complement the waterfall model, others appear to contradict its main principles. Furthermore, the performance dimensions that each practice seeks to optimize often differ. Unfortunately, these potential conflicts are difficult to resolve because the data presented to support most models is anecdotal and biased toward reporting only successful projects. Our objective here is to look at how certain practices, proposed by various development models, affect performance. By exploring different practices' associations with multiple dimensions of performance across a number of projects, we examine the trade-offs involved in designing a process to optimize specific performance criteria. We carefully selected the practices for investigation to explore some of the potential conflicts that arise between different development models.