An approach to non-invasive cost accounting

Cost accounting is an essential instrument to measure the efficiency of organizations in creating value for the market. Unfortunately, according to our experience, software development teams do not make use of cost accounting. They rarely know how much costs their projects generated, where resources could be saved, and which working habits potentially reduce costs. We assume that this is because developers and project managers think that it does not pay off to obtain cost accounting information to provide decision support. This paper proposes a non-invasive approach to cost-accounting, i.e., an approach that does not require any effort to collect costaccounting data. Using the here described approach, software development teams can measure their software development costs, understand what causes them, and react to reduce them.