The ability to accurractly estimate the time/cost taken for a project to come to it's successful conclusion has been a serious problem for software engineers.
The use of repetable, clearly defined and well understood software development process has in recent years shown itself to be the most effective method of gaining useful historical data[?] that can be used for statistical estimation.
This is one of the reasions that the use of CMM, CMMI[?] and SPICE process models have become so prevelant.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump