摘要：In software projects, software development progress tracking against the plan is critical for ensuring success of the project, cost variance, effort variance and time schedule variance do occur during project running and at the closure of project, if these variances are significantly large then this impacts the project success negatively, Thus, it is necessary to monitor these variances and subsequently finding causes and take corrective actions in due time. So, at any point of time, senior project management need to know percentage of completion, cost variance and cost variance is a function of effort variance, to compute effort variance, planned effort at any given point to be known (actual effort is known using time sheets) and in software projects, it is not possible to prepare detailed breakdown information and make this as a part of organization wide central system (many projects running in the organization at the same time) visible to senior project management of the organization. So, a gross level mechanism is needed to know status of the project. This study aims to explore various mathematical methods for progress tracking, limitations of these and evolving a new method for progress tracking. By adopting standard computing methodologies, our research explored and devised a new method for software tracking for computing percentage of completion of project, effort variance and cost variance at any point of time in the absence of availability of detailed and full breakdown information needed for applying earned value management. Using this new method, project variances can be monitored and tracked and thus increasing project success rate by correcting variances. We also take a software project as the application scenario to illustrate our method using obtained results and evidence is analyzed for deriving the final conclusion.
