An Analysis of Cost-Overrun Projects Using Financial Data and Software Metrics

To clarify the characteristics of cost-overrun software projects, this paper focuses on the cost to sales ratio of software development, computed from financial information of a midsize software company in the embedded systems domain, and analyzes the correlation with outsourcing ratio as well as code reuse ratio and relative effort ratio per development phase. As a result, we found that the lower cost to sales ratio projects had the higher relative effort ratio in external design phase, which indicates that spending less effort in external design can cause decrease of profit. We also found that high outsourcing ratio projects had higher cost to sales ratio, and that projects having moderate code reuse ratio had lower and disperse cost to sales ratio, which suggests troubles in code reuse can damage the profit of a project.