SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT AND PRACTICE Softw. Process Improve. Pract. 2006; 11: 557–559 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/spip.317 Editorial Supporting Software Development: Enhancing Productivity, Management and Control Darren Dalcher Editor-in-Chief Software Process: Improvement and Practice Dear Reader, Welcome to the last issue of SPIP for 2006. This year has been very significant for the growth of SPIP. Following on from the success of the last year, we significantly increased the page budget per issue, which means that each issue contained more papers and articles than in previous year. For the first time ever we also published six issues this year. The growth has ensured that the SPIP office was kept busy with a constant flow of good quality arti- cles and excellent proposals for special issues. You can see some of the future articles that have already been accepted in our dedicated area on the web. We are committed to continuing our work to make this the leading journal in the area of process improve- ment, maturity, capability and growth. Over the last year, we have had excellent articles covering best practice and experience alongside research reports identifying new trends and developments in pro- cess improvement and related areas. The final issue of 2006 showcases both research and practice articles. While the failure of IT projects continues to tarnish the reputation of software development, researchers and practitioners are seeking new methods for addressing the inherent, and forever growing, complexity of projects. The requirement to deliver systems faster in the Internet age results in collapsed schedules and less time for supporting activities. The focus on the speed of Copyright  2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. delivery also means that we need to keep looking to improve methods of delivery, enhance productivity, continue to focus on business benefits, find ways of re-using and using existing components, and support developers by providing automated tools. These targets are addressed by the articles in this issue. Productivity measurement continues to prove a challenge for software development. While the manufacturing industries have tried and tested methods for determining productivity, computing lags behind in terms of evaluating the outcomes of development projects and predicting the effort (and cost) required to complete such projects. With the increasing demands of the global economy with expectation of just-in-time delivery, productivity measures can play a key part in value creation especially in innovative areas where beating the competition provides an added benefit. The articles by Asmild, Paradi and Kulkarni attempts to clar- ify the relationship between function points and the corresponding development effort in the con- text of software development projects in a large Canadian bank. Empirical work in this area is still relatively rare and the article is able to use a rela- tively large dataset of completed projects within the bank. The authors combine traditional regression models with data envelopment analysis, a fractional linear programming-based approach that identifies best performers, and thus provides a way of bench- marking against the best. The resulting average efficiency measure of projects within the dataset