Software Engineering Economics And Declining Budgets

Software Engineering Economics is a relatively new discipline that deals with all segments of the software life cycle. The discipline has received much visibility in recent years because of the size and cost considerations of many software development and maintenance efforts. This book places additional emphasis on the Federal Government`s Information Resource Management initiative and deals with related issues such as Business Re-engineering, Functional Economic Analysis, Organizational Process Modelling and the Economics of Reuse.

This volume presents a selection of the presentations from the first annual conference on Analytical Methods in Software Engineering Economics held at The MITRE Corporation in McLean, Virginia. The papers are representative of the issues that are of interest to researchers in the economics of information systems and software engineering economics. The 1990s are presenting software economists with a particularly difficult set of challenges. Because of budget considerations, the number of large new software development efforts is declining. The primary focus has shifted to issues relating to upgrading and migrating existing systems. In this environment, productivity enhancing methodologies and tools are of primary interest. The MITRE Software Engineering Analysis Conference was designed to address some of th,~ new and difficult challenges that face our profession. The primary objective of the conference was to address new theoretical and applications directions in Software Engineering Economics, a relatively new discipline that deals with the management and control of all segments of the software life-cycle. The discipline has received much visibility in the last twenty-five years because of the size and cost considerations of many software development and maintenance efforts, particularly in the Federal Government. We thank everyone who helped make this conference a success, especially those who graciously allowed us to include their work in this volume.

Cost analysis and estimating is a vital part of the running of all organizations, both commercial and government. This volume comprises the proceedings of the 1992 conference of the Society for Cost Estimating and Analysis. Individual chapters are written by experts in their respective fields. Consequently, the volume as a whole provides an invaluable and up-to-date survey of the field.

The IT community has always struggled with questions concerning the value of an organization’s investment in software and hardware. It is the goal of value-based software engineering (VBSE) to develop models and measures of value which are of use for managers, developers and users as they make tradeoff decisions between, for example, quality and cost or functionality and schedule – such decisions must be economically feasible and comprehensible to the stakeholders with differing value perspectives. VBSE has its roots in work on software engineering economics, pioneered by Barry Boehm in the early 1980s. However, the emergence of a wider scope that defines VBSE is more recent. VBSE extends the merely technical ISO software engineering definition with elements not only from economics, but also from cognitive science, finance, management science, behavioral sciences, and decision sciences, giving rise to a truly multi-disciplinary framework. Biffl and his co-editors invited leading researchers and structured their contributions into three parts, following an introduction into the area by Boehm himself. They first detail the foundations of VBSE, followed by a presentation of state-of-the-art methods and techniques. The third part demonstrates the benefits of VBSE through concrete examples and case studies. This book deviates from the more anecdotal style of many management-oriented software engineering books and so appeals particularly to all readers who are interested in solid foundations for high-level aspects of software engineering decision making, i.e., to product or project managers driven by economics and to software engineering researchers and students.

Software Engineering Economics is an invaluable guide to determining software costs, applying the fundamental concepts of microeconomics to software engineering, and utilizing economic analysis in software engineering decision making.

The Economics of Information Systems and Software focuses on the economic aspects of information systems and software, including advertising, evaluation of information systems, and software maintenance. The book first elaborates on value and values, software business, and scientific information as an economic category. Discussions focus on information products and information services, special economic properties of information, culture and convergence, hardware and software products, materiality and consumption, technological progress, and software flexibility. The text then takes a look at advertising to finance software, perspectives on East-West relations in economics and information, and evaluation of information systems. Topics include research on information systems, knowledge on Eastern European information services, GDR information institutes, local databases, GDR databases, CMEA directions, and theoretical propositions. The manuscript reviews software reuse, software methodology in the harsh light of economics, quantitative aspects of software maintenance management, and calibrating a software cost-estimation model. Concerns cover the need for calibration, measuring maintainability, prognosis of maintenance effort, object-oriented programming, metaprogramming, and software quality and reuse. The text is a dependable reference for computer science experts and researchers wanting to explore further the economics of information systems and software.

Annotation Is your organization getting the maximum value out of its precious, limitedresources (specifically, money, time, and manpower)? Most professionaldevelopers do not consider the business implications of the technical decisionsthey are making -- but they should! In order for software engineering to trulybecome an engineering discipline, software professionals need to know andunderstand the engineering economy. This new book helps software practitioners appreciate the organizationalramifications of each decision they make. It is an insight into the engineeringeconomy that more software organizations aspire to. Each chapter contains aseries of self-study questions to help the reader apply the learned techniques, and the book can also serve as a reference that software engineers can turn to, again and again.

Software systems now invade every area of daily living. Yet, we still struggle to build systems we can really rely on. If we want to work with software systems at any level, we need to get to grips with the way software evolves. This book will equip the reader with a sound understanding of maintenance and how it affects all levels of the software evolution process.