Abstract :
For computers of all sizes, software has become a critical element in systems design and implementation. As dramatically as the costs of hardware have dropped, the labor-intensive costs of software have risen. In addition, there are no widely accepted and practiced techniques for controlling and estimating software development and manufacturing (size) costs, or forecasting software capability and reliability. To be sure, these problems are being addressed by software engineering, but today that is still a very primitive discipline in comparison with other computer engineering fields.
