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Home > Resources > Latest Research
Increasing staff on software projects doesn’t dramatically shorten the development schedule, as larger teams typically create much more defects, a new study shows. In addition to team size, major success factors include controlling requirements changes, domain knowledge, proper tooling and, not surprisingly, effective project leadership.
Putting a large team on a software project can cost millions of dollars more, yet save only a few days’ delivery time, according to new research from Quantitative Software Management (QSM). While people have long suspected that larger teams operate more clumsily than small ones, there has been little quantifiable research on the impact of this phenomenon, until now.
QSM, which has been compiling detailed data across all major industry segments for nearly 20 years, said the study represents the latest three-year time slice for the data.
For a typical project of 40,000 source lines of code, QSM found that, on average, a 29-person team took 191 staff months of effort and cost $2.3 million (at $12,000 per person month). For a comparable project, a 2.5-person team took 40 staff months and cost $480,000. The larger teams saved 12 calendar days, on average, trimming the schedule from seven months to about 6 1/2 months. Meanwhile, a dramatic savings of about $1.8 million was experienced with the small-team approach.
“Of course, if time to delivery is critical, a company might believe that the additional cost is worth it,” said Doug Putnam, managing partner at QSM.
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