A Preliminary Exploration into a Structured Approach to Software Development Cost Estimation

摘要

Difficulties in planning and scheduling of software development are inherent in the nature of large scale software design projects, and are recognized to be causes of overruns in developmental dollar and manpower costs. The author focuses on improving this undesirable cost behavior by exploring a prospective basis for software development cost estimation that is compatible to the planning and design functions of a project's lower level managers. The author develops a concept that software controls a set of objects to behave in accordance with a desired behavioral pattern defined in a set of design specifications. If the structure of the desirable behavior is a good predictor of the pending software's structure, the author reasons that the structure of the desirable behavior might also serve as a basis of cost estimations techniques that are more consistent with the planning and scheduling needs of intermediate project managers. The author develops a model for establishing a functional structure to the object's desirable behavior, develops software using his model, and measures the correlation between the software's structure and the behavioral structure projected by his model. He concludes that the structure of the desired behavior is insufficient as a single-factor predictor of software structure.