Calculating the Value of PI

In high school, you may have learned that pi is equal to roughly three and change. Now that you're a PM professional, you know that PI is worth a whole lot more than that. Despite the popularity of Process Improvement these days, there hasn't been much discussion of the schedules, costs and real value of bringing your software development to the highest levelsuntil now.

Abstract
The topic of software process improvement is now very popular in the United States, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. There are many local chapters of the well-known software process improvement network or SPIN. Unfortunately the popularity of a topic is not commensurate with the quantitative data that is available about a topic. In the case of process improvement, there is a severe shortage of information on the schedules, costs, and results of moving from marginal to superior performance in software development.

This report shows a 36 month case study derived from several of SPR's clients to illustrate four tangible aspects of software process improvement: 1) What it costs to achieve software excellence; 2) How long it will take to achieve excellence; 3) What kind of value will result from achieving software excellence; 4) What kinds of quality, schedule, and productivity levels can be achieved?

Introduction
Thanks to the pioneering work of Watts Humphrey (Humphrey 1989) and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) the topic of software process improvement has become one of the major themes of the software engineering community.

The topic of software process improvement is featured in many international conferences.