This paper analyzes cause and effect of the deviation of actual cost
(measured by person-month) from estimated cost for software
development project. Although the obtained results themselves may
not be new from the academic point of view, they may give a nice
motivation for developers to join process improvement activities in
the software company and thus become a driving force for promoting
process improvement.
To be precise, we show that if the projects are performed faithfully
under the well organized plan(that is, the plan is first constructed
according to the standards of good writing and then projects are
managed and controlled to meet the plan), then the deviation of actual
cost from estimated one becomes small. Next we show statistically that the
projects with small deviation of the cost estimate tend to achieve high
quality of final product and high productivity of development team.
In this analysis, actual project data on 37 projects at a certain
company are extensively applied.