The use of software engineering data in support of project management

Based on software metrics data from a large (19 working-years) software development project, a number of analyses have been carried out. The results reveal the causes for cost overruns, show how effort planning can be refined during development, and identify a relationship between the quality of the design documents and the effort consumed for their production. This gives an insight into the development process and establishes norms for interpreting metrics values obtained in future projects. In this way, it is a first step for a company towards increasing its software development process maturity level