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.
Poor quality continues to bedevil large-scale development projects, but few software leaders and practitioners know how to measure quality, select quality best practices, or cost-justify their usage. In The Economics of Software Quality, leading software quality experts Capers Jones and Jitendra Subramanyam show how to systematically measure the economic impact of quality and how to use this information to deliver far more business value. Using empirical data from hundreds of software organizations, Jones and Subramanyam show how integrated inspection, static analysis, and testing can achieve defect removal rates exceeding 95 percent. They offer innovative guidance for predicting and measuring defects and quality; choosing defect prevention, pre-test defect removal, and testing methods; and optimizing post-release defect reporting and repair. This book will help you Prove that improved software quality translates into strongly positive ROI and greatly reduced TCO Drive better results from current investments in debugging and prevention Use quality techniques to stay on schedule and on budget Avoid "hazardous" metrics that lead to poor decisions Important note: The audio and video content included with this enhanced eBook can be viewed only using iBooks on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
This is the most authoritative archive of Barry Boehm's contributions to software engineering. Featuring 42 reprinted articles, along with an introduction and chapter summaries to provide context, it serves as a "how-to" reference manual for software engineering best practices. It provides convenient access to Boehm's landmark work on product development and management processes. The book concludes with an insightful look to the future by Dr. Boehm.
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.
In the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK(R) Guide), the IEEE Computer Society establishes a baseline for the body of knowledge for the field of software engineering, and the work supports the Society's responsibility to promote the advancement of both theory and practice in this field. It should be noted that the Guide does not purport to define the body of knowledge but rather to serve as a compendium and guide to the knowledge that has been developing and evolving over the past four decades. Now in Version 3.0, the Guide's 15 knowledge areas summarize generally accepted topics and list references for detailed information. The editors for Version 3.0 of the SWEBOK(R) Guide are Pierre Bourque (Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS), Universite du Quebec) and Richard E. (Dick) Fairley (Software and Systems Engineering Associates (S2EA)).
A groundbreaking book in this field, Software Engineering Foundations: A Software Science Perspective integrates the latest research, methodologies, and their applications into a unified theoretical framework. Based on the author's 30 years of experience, it examines a wide range of underlying theories from philosophy, cognitive informatics, denota
Economics-driven Software Architecture presents a guide for engineers and architects who need to understand the economic impact of architecture design decisions: the long term and strategic viability, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability of applications and systems. Economics-driven software development can increase quality, productivity, and profitability, but comprehensive knowledge is needed to understand the architectural challenges involved in dealing with the development of large, architecturally challenging systems in an economic way. This book covers how to apply economic considerations during the software architecting activities of a project. Architecture-centric approaches to development and systematic evolution, where managing complexity, cost reduction, risk mitigation, evolvability, strategic planning and long-term value creation are among the major drivers for adopting such approaches. It assists the objective assessment of the lifetime costs and benefits of evolving systems, and the identification of legacy situations, where architecture or a component is indispensable but can no longer be evolved to meet changing needs at economic cost. Such consideration will form the scientific foundation for reasoning about the economics of nonfunctional requirements in the context of architectures and architecting.
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.
A lucid statement of the philosophy of modular programming can be found in a 1970 textbook on the design of system programs by Gouthier and Pont [1, l Cfl0. 23], which we quote below: A well-defined segmentation of the project effort ensures system modularity. Each task fonos a separate, distinct program module. At implementation time each module and its inputs and outputs are well-defined, there is no confusion in the intended interface with other system modules. At checkout time the in tegrity of the module is tested independently; there are few sche duling problems in synchronizing the completion of several tasks before checkout can begin. Finally, the system is maintained in modular fashion; system errors and deficiencies can be traced to specific system modules, thus limiting the scope of detailed error searching. Usually nothing is said about the criteria to be used in dividing the system into modules. This paper will discuss that issue and, by means of examples, suggest some criteria which can be used in decomposing a system into modules. A Brief Status Report The major advancement in the area of modular programming has been the development of coding techniques and assemblers which (1) allow one modu1e to be written with little knowledge of the code in another module, and (2) alJow modules to be reas sembled and replaced without reassembly of the whole system.
Marine Engineering Economics and Cost Analysis is intended for students and practitioners of ship design, shipbuilding, and ship operations who want to understand and apply the concepts of engineering economics to routine engineering decisions. Computer software is included to aid in completing the analyses required. "To my knowledge this is the first text published during my fifty-year career...that deals with the methods of economic evaluation of maritime decision alternatives from an engineering viewpoint....This book applies engineering economics and cost analysis to the maritime industry and sets forth in a logical sequence the method to reach the most efficient vessel from both a cost and capacity-required approach."--from the foreword by Captain Warren G. Leback, former maritime administrator.