Use of cluster analysis to evaluate software engineering methodologies

The development of quantitative measures to evaluate software development techniques is necessary if we are going to develop appropriate methodologies for software production. Data is collected by the Software Engineering Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on developing medium scale projects of up to ten man years effort. In this study, cluster analysis was used on this collected data and several measures are proposed. These measurements are objective, quantifiable, are the results of the methodology, and most important, seem relevant.