Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1584

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:40:08 +0000 (UTC) in alt.folklore.computers,

IIRC some base data came from TRW and USAF, some results published as: Software Engineering Economics, Barry W. Boehm, PH, 1981 and latterly at USC CSE: Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II, Barry W. Boehm, PH, 2000 also and some others have similar interests.

Management always jumps on any technology that claims 10x cost reductions, but never estimate costs for existing technology and set budgets for newer technology at 10% of estimate. Many of the benefits of the new technologies mentioned were in actually delivering specific types of products, often with certain qualities better than previously, but rarely with any dramatic cost reduction.

It seems to be pretty rare for any kind of feedback to be used or shared within most organizations.

Perhaps sufficiently serious security breaches and large losses affecting corporate existence will increase the quality requirements and approaches, but don't bet on it where there is a focus on short term profits and a litigious society where there is always someone else to blame and sue.

Might be interesting to compare similar projects developed in the American and European arenas to see if there are any qualitative or even possibly quanbreastative differences.

MS is a business focused on marketing: they will lose market cred and share more quickly if they don't show they're doing something, so they're issuing more patches, but that leads to new boundary conditions, which require more patches. They need to redevelop new versions from scratch with a customer security focus, but their design goals seem to be to protect their own profits, and those of media content providers, and further limit their customers' rights, not improve their customers' security. They believe they have a monopoly on their customer base, and their marketing seems very capable of selling software at higher prices and profit margins. Remember the reports of Windows 95 buyers who didn't even own a computer?

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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