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