Comments

TOPIC: SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ECONOMICS

Vazhoor Bhasul Vyas (Group S7)

A6452624@ntu.edu.sg

Conclusions, Comments and Possible Future Work

POSSIBLE FUTURE EXTENSION OF IDEAS IN ARTICLE

The following areas of Software Engineering Economics could be considered for future research:

	Software Size Estimation: The function point approach and the sizing estimation model can be improved upon to provide a more sound sizing estimate.
	Software Size and Complexity metrics: Many metrics have been developed to replace delivered source instruction (DSI) but they are yet to exhibit any practical superiority to DSI.
	Software Cost Driver attributes and their effects
	Software Cost Model Analysis and Refinement

COMMENTS ON THE NOTATIONS/DIAGRAMS USED IN THE ARTICLE

The article contained numerous tables which helped present the large amounts of technical and statistical information clearly. The article also contained various graphs which helped demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the various cost estimation techniques.

comments on the results presented in the paper and its relevance to the immediate future

The results presented in the paper establish the benefits of a good software estimation model that provides a clear and consistent universe of discourse within which many of the software engineering issues arising throughout the software life cycle can be addressed. The paper also established the usefulness of the COCOMO model in achieving the same. More research has been carried out in the COCOMO model since then and the Ada COCOMO model and the COCOMO 2 model have been released. There is still room for a lot of improvement in this relatively new field. Software Cost Estimation technology provides an absolutely essential foundation for software project planning and control. Unless a software project has clear definitions of its key milestones and realistic estimates of the time and money it will take to achieve them, there is no way that a project manager can tell whether his project is under control or not. The further progress of Software Engineering Economics field depends on how clearly we software engineers can understand the quantitative and economic aspects of our decision situations. Only when these decision situations become more clearly illuminated we can study them in more detail and achieve a quantitative understanding of the software engineering process. The precise knowledge of the data involved is essential to make further progress in the field.