RESEARCH INTO THE MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING: A TRANSITIONAL ANALYSIS OF COST ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES

Abstract : The report embodies the latest results of a continuing research effort directed toward the development of management guidelines, standards, and techniques in the field of computer programming. The report is focused upon the statistical analysis of 74 completed computer programming jobs in terms of their resource-costs and related variables, e.g., man months, computer hours. The primary results are: indices of job difficulty, job type, development environment, and job uniqueness; a 'costliness' factor that permits programming tasks to be ranked in this respect; weighted composites of the indices for estimating the cost of particular programming jobs; and scoring and confidence- band techniques for blending intuitive managerial judgments with the formal cost-estimation procedures. Supplementary findings include indications of the relative sensitivity of job cost to changes in the values for the indices, and preliminary comparisons of resource usage between programs produced in machine- oriented or procedure-oriented languages.