Benchmarking Embedded Software Development Project Performance

Day-by-day managers charged with the development of complex embedded systems struggle with the evolving quality and productivity of software. Measurement and reporting of key software project metrics helps these managers visualize software development performance but oftentimes the data and subsequent analyses needed to make decisions is limited at best. Further, the software data needed from multiple software projects across the organization necessary to derive, plan, and implement longer-term strategic and tactical plans for the software organization is difficult to aggregate, organize, and report. This paper provides a way, using project metrics and data envelopment analysis, for a software organization to perform a comparative analysis of software projects, identify strengths and weaknesses of each given a specific software production efficiency model, and identify best practices that should be brought forward within the organization for further study and application on future software projects. Using this technique, a company developing product software can reliably audit and systematically adjust their business processes to continually improve and keep competitive their 'business of software.'