Cost estimation for global software development

Global software development has gathered pace in recent years. Many software projects now involve asynchronous collaboration among geographically distributed teams several time zones apart. Software costestimation for such projects becomes challenging due to factors such as effort expended in team building and knowledge transfer, creating an architecture of the software product that can be easily distributed and that minimizes cross-site communication, facilitating communication among remote teams collaborating on parts of the architecture that are interrelated and their day-to-day governance.In this paper we structure the additional cost drivers of distributed development and examine the significance of each of these factors as a contributor to the overall cost of a software development project. We suggest ways in which COCOMO II, the most widely used software development cost estimation model, can be tailored to account for these additional complexities.

[1]  Edward M. Roche,et al.  Global Software Teams , 1999 .

[2]  Ian R. McChesney,et al.  Communication and co-ordination practices in software engineering projects , 2004, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[3]  W. D. Compton,et al.  Project Goals, Team Performance, and Shared Understanding , 1999 .

[4]  Rafael Prikladnicki,et al.  Distributed Software Development: Toward an Understanding of the Relationship Between Project Team, Users and Customers , 2003, ICEIS.

[5]  Kenneth W. Boyer.  Function point analysis: measurement practices for successful software projects , 2001, SOEN.

[6]  H. Keith Edwards,et al.  Analysis of the effectiveness of global virtual teams in software engineering projects , 2003, 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the.

[7]  Robert Johansen,et al.  Globalwork : bridging distance, culture, and time , 1994 .

[8]  Steven D. Eppinger,et al.  The Misalignment of Product Architecture and Organizational Structure in Complex Product Development , 2004, Manag. Sci..

[9]  Casper Lassenius,et al.  Collaboration practices in global inter-organizational software development projects , 2003, Softw. Process. Improv. Pract..

[10]  Capers Jones.  Backfiring: Converting Lines of Code to Function Points , 1995, Computer.

[11]  Allen E. Milewski,et al.  Distributed development: an education perspective on the global studio project , 2006, ICSE '06.

[12]  T. Capers Jones,et al.  Estimating software costs , 1998 .

[13]  Audris Mockus,et al.  Distance, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration , 2000, CSCW '00.

[14]  James D. Herbsleb,et al.  Splitting the organization and integrating the code: Conway's law revisited , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (IEEE Cat. No.99CB37002).

[15]  Ita Richardson,et al.  Virtual software teams: overcoming the obstacles , 2005 .

[16]  Erran Carmel,et al.  Global software teams: collaborating across borders and time zones , 1999 .

[17]  Steven D. Eppinger,et al.  Sloan School of Management Working Paper Factors That Influence Technical Communication in Distributed Product Development: an Empirical Study in the Telecommunications Industry Factors That Influence Technical Communication in Distributed Product Development: an Empirical Study in the Telecommunica , 2022 .

[18]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Software Engineering Economics , 1993, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[19]  Bernd Brügge,et al.  Transatlantic project courses in a university environment , 2000, Proceedings Seventh Asia-Pacific Software Engeering Conference. APSEC 2000.

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

[21]  J.D. Herbsleb,et al.  Global software development at Siemens: experience from nine projects , 2005, Proceedings. 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005. ICSE 2005..