Understanding and Controlling Software Costs

Abstract Understanding of software costs is important because of the overall magnitude of these costs (in 1985, roughly $70 billion per year in the U.S. and over $140 billion per year worldwide) and because of the fundamental impact software will have on our future quality of life. Section 1 of this paper discusses these issues. Section 2, the main portion of the paper, discusses the two primary ways of understanding software costs. The “black-box” or influence-function approach provides useful experimental and observational insights on the relative software productivity and quality leverage of various management, technical, environmental, and personnel options. The “glass-box” or cost distribution approach helps identify strategies for integrated software productivity and quality improvement programs, via such structures as the value chain and the software productivity opportunity tree. The most attractive individual strategies for improving software productivity identified in Section 2 are: • Writing le...