Tracking Software Development Progress with Earned Value and Use Case Point

The earned value method is an internationally recognized project management tool for tracking progress on projects. It periodically calculates the earned value of their completed project tasks, discovers the schedule and cost variances of the projects from the baseline, and thus helps to timely take measures to adjust and control the projects. Despite its popularity, it has not been widely applied to the software development projects. After a brief introduction to the earned value method, the key issues facing its applications in software development projects were analyzed. Those how to use the function point to quantitatively represent the software project baseline and the earned value achieved by the accomplishment of project tasks were discussed. A method to track the software development progress based on the earned value analysis and use case point was proposed, and an experiment had being undertaken, which proved the effectiveness of this method to monitor and control the areas of schedule and costs of software development projects.