Approaches to Calculating Systems Engineering Schedule in Parametric Cost Models

This paper provides two similar approaches for calculating project schedule from a systems engineering perspective. To illustrate the genesis of each approach, we provide two analogies; one from economics and one from physics. These are complemented with mathematical derivations that provide quantitative comparisons of the tradeoff between the duration of a project and the optimal effort. Connections are made to Books’ Law and Parkinson’s Law to validate the theoretical discussion with the pragmatic observations from the software engineering literature.