A Quantitative Analysis of U.S. and Japanese Practice and Performance in Software Development
通过文献综述和24个美国与16个日本软件开发项目的定量数据，比较两国在生产率、质量和代码复用方面的表现，发现日本项目至少不逊于美国。
Since the early 1980s, there has been a mounting debate in industry literature and in U.S. government-sponsored reports over the relative performance of software developers in Japan versus those in the United States. This literature is somewhat divided between assertions of Japanese or U.S. superiority in this technology, although many observers in the popular business press continue to insist that the U.S. maintains an overwhelming lead in this technology. However, both sides of the debate have offered evidence that, to date, has been primarily qualitative or based on one or two cases. This paper contributes to the debate in two ways. First, it offers a comprehensive literature review that analyzes existing comparisons of Japanese and U.S. practice in software development and summarizes the major proposed differences in performance. Second, it presents the first set of quantitative data collected from a statistically comparable sample of 24 U.S. and 16 Japanese software-development projects, and uses these data to test propositions from the literature. The analyses indicate that Japanese software projects perform at least as well as their U.S. counterparts in basic measures of productivity, quality (defects), and reuse of software code. The data also make it possible to offer models that explain some of the differences in productivity and quality among projects in both countries.