What are approaches for analyzing the cost-benefits of a development methodology?

Posted by Garrett Hall on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Garrett Hall
Published on 2012-04-02T20:40:35Z Indexed on 2012/04/02 23:41 UTC
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There are many development practices (TDD, continuous integration, cowboy-coding), principles (SOLID, layers of abstraction, KISS), and processes (RUP, Scrum, XP, Waterfall). I have learned you can't follow any of these blindly, but have to consider context and ROI (return on investment).

My question is: How do you know whether you are getting a good ROI by following a particular methodology? Metrics, guesstimation, experience? Do analytical methods exist? Or is this just the million-dollar question in software engineering that has no answer?

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