Analyzing effects of cost estimation accuracy on quality and productivity

This paper discusses the effects of estimation accuracy for software development cost on both the quality of the delivered code and the productivity of the development team. The estimation accuracy is measured by metric RE (relative error). The quality and productivity are measured by metrics FQ (field quality) and TP (team productivity). Using actual project data on thirty-one projects at a certain company, the following are verified by correlation analysis and testing of statistical hypotheses. There is a high correlation between the faithfulness of the development plan to standards and the value of RE (a coefficient of correlation between them is -0.60). Both FQ and TP are significantly different between projects with -10%<RE<+10% and projects with RE⩾+10% (the level of significance is chosen as 0.05)