Measuring change in software projects through an earned value lens

Abstract

Earned Value Management (EVM) is a common performance management tool for project management. EVM enables depicting the project progress in terms of scope, cost and schedule and provides future predictions based on trends and patterns. Even though EVM is widely used in various disciplines like manufacturing and construction, it is not common in software industry. One reason for this underutilization is the mismatch of an inherent nature of the software projects and the traditional EVM. Traditional EVM ignores change effort but it is predominant in software projects. We have developed cEVM as an extension to the traditional EVM to incorporate change and subsequent rework and evolution costs to measure earned value in software development projects more accurately. In this study, we focus on two applications of cEVM we performed to explore the usability of cEVM and to compare cEVM with traditional EVM. This paper discusses the results of the case studies as well as benefits and difficulties of cEVM.