Towards the Integration of Quality Attributes into a Software Product Line Cost Model

A good estimation tool offers a "model" of a project and is usually used to estimate cost and schedule, but it can also be used to help make trade decisions that affect cost and schedule as well as to estimate risks and opportunities. It was evident that Rolls-Royce needed a cost model to underpin decisions when they launched a Software Product Line initiative. The first generation cost model was based on COCOMO II, which represents the software product as a single size measure (Source Lines of Code) but makes limited use of the architecture or any characteristics of the product being developed. The next generation of the cost model, currently under development, is intended to account for the quality attributes of the core assets and the resulting products in order to estimate their impact on cost and net-benefit to the business. The objective of this paper is to describe our current efforts to integrate key quality attributes into the SPL cost model. We describe the quality attributes selected, the reason for their selection and the benefits we expect to obtain after integrating them into the model.

[1]  Mario R. Barbacci,et al.  Quality Attribute Workshops (QAWs), Third Edition , 2003 .

[2]  Ellis Horowitz,et al.  Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II , 2000 .

[3]  Klaus Schmid,et al.  An Initial Model of Product Line Economics , 2001, PFE.

[4]  Hoyt Lougee,et al.  SOFTWARE CONSIDERATIONS IN AIRBORNE SYSTEMS AND EQUIPMENT CERTIFICATION , 2001 .

[5]  John D. McGregor,et al.  Calculating ROI for software product lines , 2004, IEEE Software.

[6]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  A software product line life cycle cost estimation model , 2004, Proceedings. 2004 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2004. ISESE '04..

[7]  Lamia Labed Jilani,et al.  A software cost estimation model for a product line engineering approach: supporting tool and UML modeling , 2005, Third ACIS Int'l Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA'05).

[8]  Silvia Mara Abrahão,et al.  Dealing with Cost Estimation in Software Product Lines: Experiences and Future Directions , 2010, SPLC.

[9]  Paul Clements,et al.  Variability in Software Product Lines , 2005 .

[10]  Soo Dong Kim,et al.  A framework for evaluating reusability of core asset in product line engineering , 2007, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[11]  Paul Clements,et al.  Software product lines - practices and patterns , 2001, SEI series in software engineering.

[12]  Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira,et al.  InCoME: Integrated Cost Model for Product Line Engineering , 2008, 2008 34th Euromicro Conference Software Engineering and Advanced Applications.

[13]  John A. McDermid,et al.  Development of High-Integrity Software Product Lines Using Model Transformation , 2010, SAFECOMP.

[14]  Paul Clements,et al.  The Structured Intuitive Model for Product Line Economics (SIMPLE) , 2005 .

[15]  Goiuria Sagardui Mendieta,et al.  Quantifying Maintainability in Feature Oriented Product Lines , 2008, 2008 12th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering.

[16]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  A quality-based cost estimation model for the product line life cycle , 2006, CACM.

[17]  Jan Bosch,et al.  Maturity and Evolution in Software Product Lines: Approaches, Artefacts and Organization , 2002, SPLC.

[18]  Tsvi Kuflik,et al.  Evaluating software reuse alternatives: a model and its application to an industrial case study , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[19]  Tao Zhang,et al.  Some Metrics for Accessing Quality of Product Line Architecture , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.

[20]  John D. McGregor,et al.  The Evolution of Product Line Assets , 2003 .