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. We developed alternative types of
benchmarks using two different modelling techniques,
namely least squares regression and regression trees.
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