Software benchmarking compares a company’s development cycle to others to determine efficiency. Quantitative data is collected and compared by third-party firms to establish values for each company. This is different from hardware benchmarking, which tests devices. Compatibility testing is also a form of software benchmarking.
Software benchmarking typically refers to a process by which a software vendor’s development cycle is compared to other companies to determine the company’s efficiency. This is often done to determine where improvements can be made in the development process and to ensure that a business is running at peak efficiency. These comparisons are usually quantitative in nature, dealing with numbers and figures to evaluate how quickly and effectively a company is performing. This type of software benchmarking should not be confused with computer hardware benchmarking, which evaluates the effectiveness of different devices and computers.
The primary purpose of software benchmarking is to determine how well one software developer performs against another. Initially, information about a developer must be gathered and considered in a quantifiable way. You can look at the time it takes for the company to build its latest program, the time it takes to fix bugs and release patches, and the number of programmers involved in these processes. Once collected, this data can be used in benchmarking the software against other companies using comparable metrics.
Third-party companies are often involved in software benchmarking, gathering information on numerous developers, which is often provided by those companies for comparison. A benchmarking firm might have data from several dozen, or even a hundred, software developers detailing quantifiable values for the time spent developing, the costs for this process, and the results based on the number of programmers. Comparisons are then made by this organization between these different developers and used to establish a number of values for each of them. Once this process is complete, each company can be informed of its performance within this larger pool and can use the software benchmarking data to determine improvements to make for future developments.
This type of software benchmarking is somewhat similar in nature to hardware benchmarking, but they are not to be confused. Hardware benchmarks are often determined by running different computer configurations and hardware components through various tests to generate data about those devices. This data is then used to compare different hardware components, in order to determine which processors or graphics cards are theoretically superior to the others in a given context.
There is a form of software benchmarking that can be done in a similar way to this, although it is more often considered part of support testing. The same program can be run on multiple computers with different devices and hardware configurations, to see which systems it is compatible with. This type of benchmark is often used to determine the minimum requirements of a program and to ensure that as large a user base as possible can run the software.
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