On using NASA Software Engineering Laboratory project data for evaluating the efficiency of software production

One of the goals of collecting project data during software development and evolution is to assess how well the project did and what should be done to improve in the future. With the wide range of data often collected and the many complicated relationships between them, this is not always easy. This paper applies some techniques from operations research to the problem of data analysis to illustrate how one could approach software process improvement quantitatively.