The ROI of Systems Engineering: Some Quantitative Results

Author

Boehm, Barry ; Valerdi, Ricardo

Author_Institution

Center for Syst. & Software Eng., Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

fYear

2007

fDate

19-21 March 2007

Firstpage

79

Lastpage

86

Abstract

This paper presents quantitative results on the return on investment of systems engineering (SE-ROI) from an analysis of the 161 software projects in the COCOMO II database. The analysis shows that, after normalizing for the effects of other cost drivers, the cost difference between projects doing a minimal job of software systems engineering - as measured by the thoroughness of its architecture definition and risk resolution - and projects doing a very thorough job was 18% for small projects and 92% for very large software projects as measured in lines of code.

Keywords

investment; project management; software cost estimation; software development management; COCOMO II database; architecture definition; cost difference; cost drivers; return on investment; risk resolution; software project; software system engineering; Computer architecture; Costs; Data analysis; Data engineering; Databases; Investments; Risk analysis; Software measurement; Software systems; Systems engineering and theory; COCOMO; return on investment;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Exploring Quantifiable IT Yields, 2007. EQUITY '07. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Amsterdam

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2537-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/EQUITY.2007.14

Filename

5206402