| Cost estimation models (1) | ||
| Date | 27 January 1997 | |
| Leader | Mary Shaw | |
| Papers | Barry W. Boehm. Software engineering economics. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-10:1, January 1984. Lawrence H. Putnam. Allan J. Albrecht and John E. Gaffney, Jr. |
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| Other Material | There are several web sites dedicated
both to software cost estimation in general and to
particular estimation models: General. - The COCOMO2 Team has assembled a general bibliography of cost estimation literature. - Alan E. Giles and Dennis Barney wrote an article in June 1995 on software cost estimation for CrossTalk, the Journal of Defense Software Engineering. COCOMO. - Nasa has created a web form for calculating estimations using Basic COCOMO. - The COCOMO2 project focusses on modernizing Barry Boehm's COCOMO. - The International Forum on COCOMO and Software Cost Modeling held its 11th annual meeting in October. SLIM. - Putnam's company, Quantitative Software Management, produces a variety of SLIM-based tools. Function points. - The International Function Point Users Group (IFPUG) is an advocacy group for the function points model. - Bruno Peeters has assembled an impressive bibliography of function points literature, which covers publications in several languages. |
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| Post Mortem | Unfortunately for our purposes, the
canonical work about COCOMO is Boehm's book Software
Engineering Economics (Prentice Hall 1981). Because
there was no suitably short subset of this work, the TSE
article was selected instead. While the article is
perfectly fine in its own right, it really doesn't
provide a good introduction to COCOMO per se. Putnam's paper concentrates on deriving his "software equation," which underlies the SLIM model, from the Rayleigh curve. For this topic, we are much more interested in how this software equation can then be applied to the cost estimation problem. Further, perhaps due to the proprietary nature of SLIM, there does not seem to be a clear introduction to the SLIM approach. Similar to the COCOMO problem, the two canonical function points papers appear in unusual publications, which could not be obtained before the meeting. The chosen paper places too much emphasis on information science as a validation of the approach and is unsuitable as an introduction to function points. All in all, there is plenty of worthwhile material here for at least one lecture in a PhD-level course. However, rather than trying to teach through the original papers (often a good approach), what's needed here is some effort to digest the material to produce an overview. Aside from teaching the topic itself, these estimation models provide a good opportunity to discuss how emperical ("curve-fit") models can be used in engineering until a theoretically founded structural model exists. Mary wrote some email with her reaction to the meeting. |
[DeLine 02/20/97]