The Relationship between Software Development Team Size and Software Development Cost

A relationship between team size and software development cost is studied in a bid to provide advanced software coordination and communication capabilities for large sized teams. The International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) provides production economics theory as a guideline for testing the relationship between team size and the associated software cost. The models such as linear regression, log-linear models to test non-linear relationships, and non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) model tests relationship between team size and software effort. The results suggest that the DEA approach do not impose a particular form on the production function and assumes a monotonically increasing and convex relationship between inputs and outputs. The constant returns to scale (CRS) means that proportional change in team size mean same proportional change in software effort.