A Case Study in Productivity Benchmarking. Methods and Lessons Learned

Productivity benchmarking allows software development projects and organizations to compare themselves to the market place in a given sector of industry. However, in practice benchmarking presents many difficulties such as identifying a meaningful basis of comparison. The European Space Agency (ESA) outsources many software projects. They have accumulated a large cost database from these projects. In this paper, we present a method for productivity benchmarking, as well as the productivity benchmarks we derived for one of our customers based on the ESA database. Furthermore, we provide usage scenarios for these models by describing how these models can be practically applied for benchmarking purposes.