CDI: Cost of development index

Managing costs and yet delivering high quality is an essential balancing act in software development projects. Usually, cost management is perceived as a process concern, leading to a disjoint view of team costs and delivered quality. We have proposed a new metric, CDI, that integrates the cost parameter with the quality of the code, to provide managers in a coherent understanding of the trade-off between cost management and quality. The metric is integrated in to an automated tool, making it easy for project teams to adopt the metric in real-life large projects.