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Project duration and staffing

Project duration and staffing
Course

Software Engineering (CSPC 111)

140 Documents
Students shared 140 documents in this course
Academic year: 2022/2023
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Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University

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Project duration and staffing

As well as estimating the overall costs of a project and the effort that is required to develop a software system, project managers must also estimate how long the software will take to develop and when staff will be needed to work on the project. Increasingly, organizations are demanding shorter development schedules so that their products can be brought to market before their competitor’s.

The COCOMO model includes a formula to estimate the calendar time required to complete a project:

TDEV 5 3 3 (PM)(0 1 0*(B 2 1))

TDEV: the nominal schedule for the project, in calendar months, ignoring any multiplier that is related to the project schedule.

PM: the effort computed by the COCOMO model.

B: a complexity-related exponent, as discussed in section 23.5.

If B 5 1 and PM = 60 then

TDEV 5 3 3 (60)0 5 13 months

The nominal project schedule predicted by the COCOMO model does not necessarily correspond with the schedule required by the software customer. You may have to deliver the software earlier or (more rarely) later than the date suggested by the nominal schedule. If the schedule is to be compressed (i., software is to be developed more quickly), this increases the effort required for the project. This is taken into account by the SCED multiplier in the effort estimation computation.

Assume that a project estimated TDEV as 13 months, as suggested above, but the actual schedule required was 10 months. This represents a schedule compression of approximately 25%. Using the values for the SCED multiplier as derived by Boehm’s team, we see that the effort multiplier for this level of schedule compression is 1.

Therefore, the actual effort that will be required if this accelerated schedule is to be met is almost 50% more than the effort required to deliver the software according to the nominal schedule.

There is a complex relationship between the number of people working on a project, the effort that will be devoted to the project. and the project delivery schedule. If four people can complete a project in 13 months (i., 52 person-months of effort), then you might think that by adding one more person, you could complete the work in 11 months ( person-months of effort). However, the COCOMO model suggests that you will, in fact, need six people to finish the work in 11 months (66 person-months of effort).

The reason for this is that adding people to a project reduces the productivity of existing team members. As the project team increases in size, team members spend more time communicating and defining interfaces between the parts of the system developed by other people. Doubling the number of staff (for example) therefore does not mean that the duration of the project will be halved.

Consequently, when you add an extra person, the actual increment of effort added is less than one person as others become less productive. If the development team is large, adding more people to a project sometimes increases rather than reduces the development schedule because of the overall effect on productivity.

■ A project milestone is a predictable outcome of an activity or set of activities. At each milestone, a formal report of progress should be presented to management. A deliverable is a work product that is delivered to the project customer.

■ The agile planning game involves the whole team in project planning. The plan is developed incrementally, and, if problems arise, it is adjusted so that software functionality is reduced instead of delaying the delivery of an increment.

■ Estimation techniques for software may be experience-based, where managers judge the effort required, or algorithmic, where the effort required is computed from other estimated project parameters.

■ The COCOMO II costing model is a mature algorithmic cost model that takes project, product, hardware, and personnel attributes into account when formulating a cost estimate.

Imagine a situation where two developers are simultaneously modifying three different software Components. What difficulties might arise when they try to merge the changes they have made?

Software is now often developed by distributed teams, with team members working at

Different locations and in different time zones. Suggest features in a version control system that could be included to support distributed software development.

Describe the difficulties that may arise when building a system from its components. What particular problems might occur when a system is built on a host computer for some target machine?

With reference to system building, explain why you may sometimes have to maintain obsolete computers on which large software systems were developed.

A common problem with system building occurs when physical filenames are incorporated in system code and the file structure implied in these names differs from that of the target machine. Write a set of programmer’s guidelines that helps avoid this and any other system-building problems that you can think of.

What are the factors that influence the decision on whether or not a change should be implemented?

Describe six essential features that should be included in a tool to support change management processes.

Explain why preparing and distributing a system release for mass-market products is an expensive process.

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Project duration and staffing

Course: Software Engineering (CSPC 111)

140 Documents
Students shared 140 documents in this course

University: STI West Negros University

Was this document helpful?
Project duration and staffing
As well as estimating the overall costs of a project and the effort that is required to
develop a software system, project managers must also estimate how long the software
will take to develop and when staff will be needed to work on the project. Increasingly,
organizations are demanding shorter development schedules so that their products can
be brought to market before their competitor’s.
The COCOMO model includes a formula to estimate the calendar time required to
complete a project:
TDEV 5 3 3 (PM)(0.33 1 0.2*(B 2 1.01))
TDEV: the nominal schedule for the project, in calendar months, ignoring any multiplier
that is related to the project schedule.
PM: the effort computed by the COCOMO model.
B: a complexity-related exponent, as discussed in section 23.5.2.
If B 5 1.17 and PM = 60 then
TDEV 5 3 3 (60)0.36 5 13 months

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