It is quite clear that productivity in software project will fall down “little bit” when you hand over the project to somebody else.

New team does not have all the knowledge of original author and it takes longer time to solve project issues.

The problem is that this loss in productivity is not quantified and project managers relay just on some fuzzy feeling.

I found interesting talk given by Audris Mockus about Digital Software Archeology. He made deep research in the topic of productivity in software development and he defined several useful terms.

Audris formulate very interesting result of his research: Productivity after handover dropped to 1/2. This is quite important to realize. It affects project planning and resource allocation.