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UNIT-II
Improving Software Economics
- It is not that much easy to improve the software economics but also difficult to measure and
validate.
- There are many aspects are there in order to improve the software economics they are, Size,
Process, Personnel, Environment and quality.
- These parameters (aspects) are not independent they are dependent. For example, tools enable
size reduction and process improvements, size-reduction approaches lead to process changes,
and process improvements drive tool requirements.
- GUI technology is a good example of tools enabling a new and different process. GUI builder
tools permitted engineering teams to construct an executable user interface faster and less cost.
- Two decades ago, teams developing a user interface would spend extensive time analyzing
factors, screen layout, and screen dynamics. All this would done on paper. Where as by using
GUI, the paper descriptions are not necessary.
- Along with these five basic parameters another important factor that has influenced software
technology improvements across the board is the ever-increasing advances in hardware

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performance.

REDUCING SOFTWARE PRODUCT SIZE:

- By choosing the type of the language

- By using Object-Oriented methods and visual modeling

- By reusing the existing components and building reusable components &

- By using commercial components,we can reduce the product size of a software.

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Here UPFs (Universal Function Points) are useful estimators for language-independent in the
early life cycle phases. The basic units of function points are:

- External user inputs

- External outputs

- Internal logical data groups

- External data Interfaces

- External inquiries

OBJECT ORIENTED METHODS AND VISUAL MODELING:

- There has been a widespread movements in the 1990s toward Object-Oriented

technology.

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- Some studies concluded that Object-Oriented programming languages appear to benefit

both software productivity and software quality. One of such Object-Oriented method is UML-
Unified Modeling Language.

Booch described the following three reasons for the success of the projects that are using
Object-Oriented concepts:

1) An OO-model of the problem and its solution encourages a common vocabulary

between the end user of a system and its developers, thus creating a shared understanding of the
problem being solved.

2) The use of continuous integration creates opportunities to recognize risk early and
make incremental corrections without weaken the entire development effort.

3) An OO-architecture provides a clear separation among different elements of a system,

crating firewalls that prevent a change in one part of the system from the entire architecture.

He also suggested five characteristics of a successful OO-Project,

1) A cruel focus on the development of a system that provides a well understood

collection of essential minimal characteristics.

2) The existence of a culture that is centered on results, encourages communication, and

yet is not afraid to fail.

3) The effective use of OO-modeling.

4) The existence of a strong architectural vision.

5) The application of a well-managed iterative and incremental development life cycle.

REUSE:

Organizations that translates reusable components into commercial products has the
following characteristics:

- They have an economic motivation for continued support.

- They take ownership of improving product quality, adding new features and
transitioning to new technologies.

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- They have a sufficiently broad customer base to be profitable.

COMMERCIAL COMPONENTS

IMPROVING SOFTWARE PROCESSES:

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There are three distinct process perspectives:

1) Meta process:

- It is an Organization’s policies, procedures, and practices for pursuing a software-

intensive line of business.

- The focus of this process is of organizational economics, long-term strategies, and

a software ROI.

2) Macro process:

- A project’s policies, and practices for producing a complete software product

within certain cost, schedule, and quality constraints.

- The focus of the macroprocess is on creating an sufficient instance of the

metaprocess for a specific set of constraints.

3) Micro process:

- A projects team’s policies, procedures, and practices for achieving an artifact of a

software process.

- The focus of the microprocess is on achieving an intermediate product baseline

with sufficient functionality as economically and rapidly as practical.

The objective of process improvement is to maximize the allocation of resources to

productive activities and minimize the impact of overhead activities on resources such as
personnel, computers, and schedule.

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IMPROVING TEAM EFFECTIVENESS:

- COCOMO model suggests that the combined effects of personnel skill and experience can
have an impact on productivity as much as a factor of four over the unskilled personnel.

- Balance and coverage are two of the most important features of excellent teams.
Whenever a team is in out of balance then it is vulnerable.

- It is the responsibility of the project manager to keep track of his teams. Since teamwork
is much more important than the sum of the individuals.

Boehm – staffing principles:

1) The principle of top talent: Use better and fewer people.

2) The principle of job matching: Fit the tasks to the skills and motivation of the people
available.

3) The principle of career progression: An organization does best in the long run by
helping its people to self-actualize.

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4) The principle of team balance: Select people who will complement and synchronize
with one another.

5) The principle of phase-out: Keeping a misfit on the team doesn’t benefit anyone.

In general, staffing is achieved by these common methods:

– If people are already available with required skill set, just take them

– If people are already available but do not have the required skills, re-train them

– If people are not available, recruit trained people

– If you are not able to recruit skilled people, recruit and train people

Staffing of key personnel is very important:

- Project Manager

- Software Architect

Important Project Manager Skills:

 Hiring skills. Few decisions are as important as hiring decisions. Placing the right person
in the right job seems obvious but is surprisingly hard to achieve.

 Customer-interface skill. Avoiding adversarial relationships among stake-holders is a

prerequisite for success.

 Decision-making skill. The jillion books written about management have failed to
provide a clear definition of this attribute. We all know a good leader when we run into
one, and decision-making skill seems obvious despite its intangible definition.

 Team-building skill. Teamwork requires that a manager establish trust, motivate

progress, exploit eccentric prima donnas, transition average people into top performers,
eliminate misfits, and consolidate diverse opinions into a team direction.

 Selling skill. Successful project managers must sell all stakeholders (including
themselves) on decisions and priorities, sell candidates on job positions, sell changes to
the status quo in the face of resistance, and sell achievements against objectives. In
practice, selling requires continuous negotiation, compromise, and empathy.

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Important Software Architect Skills:

• Technical Skills: the most important skills for an architect. These must include
skills in both, the problem domain and the solution domain
• People Management Skills: must ensure that all people understand and
implement the architecture in exactly the way he has conceptualized it. This
calls for a lot of people management skills and patience.
• Role Model: must be a role model for the software engineers – they would
emulate all good (and also all bad !) things that the architect does
IMPROVING AUTOMATION THROUGH SOFTWARE
ENVIRONMENTS
The following are the some of the configuration management environments
which provide the foundation for executing and implementing the process:

Planning tools, Quality assurance and analysis tools, Test tools, and User
interfaces provide crucial automation support for evolving the software engineering
artifacts.
Round-trip engineering: is a term used to describe the key capability of
environments that support iterative development.
Forward engineering: is the automation of one engineering artifact from
another, more abstract representation. Ex: compilers and linkers
Reverse engineering: is the generation of modification of more abstract
representation from an existing artifact. Ex: creating visual design model from
a source code.
ACHIEVING REQUIRED QUALITY:

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Key elements that improve overall software quality include the

following:
- Focusing on powerful requirements and critical use case early in the life
cycle
- Focusing on requirements completeness and traceability late in the life cycle
- Focusing throughout the life cycle on a balance between requirements
evolution, design evolution, and plan evolution
- Using metrics and indicators to measure the progress and quality of an
architecture as it evolves from high-level prototype into a fully biddable
product
- Providing integrated life-cycle environments that support early and
continuous configuration control, change management, rigorous design
methods, document automation, and regression test automation
- Using visual modeling and higher level languages that support architectural
control, abstraction, reliable programming, reuse, and self-documentation
- Early and continuous close look into performance issues through
demonstration-based evaluations
In order to evaluate the performance the following sequence of events are necessary,

1) Project inception 2) Initial design review

2) Mid-life-cycle design review 4) Integration and test

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PEER INSPECTIONS: A PRAGMATIC VIEW:

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THE OLD WAY AND THE NEW

- Over the past two decades software development is a re-engineering process.
Now it is replaced by advanced software engineering technologies.

- This transition is was motivated by the unsatisfactory demand for the software
and reduced cost.
THE PRINCIPLES OF CONVENTIONAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Based on many years of software development experience, the software

industry proposed so many principles (nearly 201 by – Davis’s). Of which
Davis’s top 30 principles are:

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1) Make quality #1: Quality must be quantified and mechanisms put into place
to motivate its achievement.
2) High-quality software is possible: In order to improve the quality of the
product we need to involving the customer, select the prototyping, simplifying
design, conducting inspections, and hiring the best people.
3) Give products to customers early: No matter how hard you try to learn user’s
needs during the requirements phase, the most effective way to determine real
needs is to give users a product and let them play with it.
4) Determine the problem before writing the requirements: Whenever a
problem is raised most engineers provide a solution. Before we try to solve a
problem, be sure to explore all the alternatives and don’t be blinded by the
understandable solution.
5) Evaluate design alternatives: After the requirements are greed upon, we must
examine a variety of architectures and algorithms and choose the one which is not
used earlier.
6) Use an appropriate process model: For every project, there are so many
prototypes (process models). So select the best one that is exactly suitable to our
project.
7) Use different languages for different phases: Our industry’s main aim is to
provide simple solutions to complex problems. In order to accomplish this goal
choose different languages for different modules/phases if required.
8) Minimize intellectual distance: We have to design the structure of a software
is as close as possible to the real-world structure.
9) Put techniques before tools: An un disciplined software engineer with a tool
becomes a dangerous, undisciplined software engineer.

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10) Get it right before you make it faster: It is very easy to make a working
program run faster than it is to make a fast program work. Don’t worry about
optimization during initial coding.
11) Inspect the code: Examine the detailed design and code is a much better way
to find the errors than testing.
12) Good management is more important than good technology
13) People are the key to success: Highly skilled people with appropriate
experience, talent, and training are key. The right people with insufficient tools,
languages, and process will succeed.
14) Follow with care: Everybody is doing something but does not make it right
for you. It may be right, but you must carefully assess its applicability to your
environment.
15) Take responsibility: When a bridge collapses we ask “what did the engineer
do wrong?”. Similarly if the software fails, we ask the same. So the fact is in
every engineering discipline, the best methods can be used to produce poor results
and the most out of date methods to produce stylish design.
16) Understand the customer’s priorities. It is possible the customer would
tolerate 90% of the functionality delivered late if they could have 10% of it on
time.

17) The more they see, the more they need. The more functionality (or
performance) you provide a user, the more functionality (or performance) the
user wants.

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18) Plan to throw one away .One of the most important critical success factors
is whether or not a product is entirely new. Such brand-new applications,
architectures, interfaces, or algorithms rarely work the first time.
19) Design for change. The architectures, components, and specification
techniques you use must accommodate change.
20) Design without documentation is not design. I have often heard software
engineers say, “I have finished the design. All that is left is the documentation.”
21. Use tools, but be realistic. Software tools make their users more efficient.
22. Avoid tricks. Many programmers love to create programs with tricks-
constructs that perform a function correctly, but in an obscure way. Show the
world how smart you are by avoiding tricky code.
23. Encapsulate. Information-hiding is a simple, proven concept that results in
software that is easier to test and much easier to maintain.
24. Use coupling and cohesion. Coupling and cohesion are the best ways to
measure software’s inherent maintainability and adaptability.
25. Use the McCabe complexity measure. Although there are many metrics
available to report the inherent complexity of software, none is as intuitive and
easy to use as Tom McCabe’s.
26. Don’t test your own software. Software developers should never be the
primary testers of their own software.
27. Analyze causes for errors. It is far more cost-effective to reduce the effect of
an error by preventing it than it is to find and fix it. One way to do this is to
analyze the causes of errors as they are detected.
28. Realize that software’s entropy increases. Any software system that
undergoes continuous change will grow in complexity and become more and
more disorganized.

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29. People and time are not interchangeable. Measuring a project solely by
person-months makes little sense.
30) Expert excellence. Your employees will do much better if you have high
expectations for them.

THE PRINCIPLES OF MODERN SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT

1) Base the process on an architecture-first approach: (Central design element)

- Design and integration first, then production and test

2) Establish an iterative life-cycle process: (The risk management element)

- Risk control through ever-increasing function, performance, quality.

With today’s sophisticated systems, it is not possible to define the entire

problem, design the entire solution, build the software, then test the end product in sequence.
Instead, and iterative process that refines the problem understanding, an effective solution,
and an effective plan over several iterations encourages balanced treatment of all stakeholder
objectives.

Major risks must be addressed early to increase predictability and avoid expensive
downstream scrap and rework.

3) Transition design methods to emphasize component-based development: (The

technology element)

Moving from LOC mentally to component-based mentally is necessary to

reduce the amount of human-generated source code and custom development.A component is
a cohesive set of preexisting lines of code, either in source or executable format, with a
defined interface and behavior.

4) Establish a change management environment: (The control element)

- Metrics, trends, process instrumentation

The dynamics of iterative development, include concurrent workflows by different

teams working on shared artifacts, necessitates objectively controlled baseline.

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5) Enhance change freedom through tools that support round-trip engineering: (The
automation element)

- Complementary tools, integrated environment

Round-trip engineering is the environment support necessary to automate and

synchronize engineering information in different formats. Change freedom is necessary in an
iterative process.

6) Capture design artifacts in rigorous, model-based notation:

- A model-based approach supports the evolution of semantically rich graphical and

textual design notations.

- Visual modeling with rigorous notations and formal machine- process able language
provides more objective measures than the traditional approach of human review and
inspection of ad hoc design representations in paper doc.

7) Instrument the process for objective quality control and progress assessment:

- Life-cycle assessment of the progress and quality of all intermediate product must be
integrated into the process.

- The best assessment mechanisms are well-defined measures derived directly from the
evolving engineering artifacts and integrated into all activities and teams.

8) Use a demonstration-based approach to assess intermediate artifacts:

Transitioning from whether the artifact is an early prototype, a baseline architecture,

or a beta capability into an executable demonstration of relevant provides more tangible
understanding of the design tradeoffs, early integration and earlier elimination of architectural
defects.

9) Plan intermediate releases in groups of usage scenarios with evolving levels

of detail:

10) Establish a configurable process that economically scalable:

No single process is suitable for all software developments. The process must
ensure that there is economy of scale and ROI.

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