Paper Info
Title
The economic impact of software process variations
Abstract
The economic benefit of a certain development process or particular activity is usually unknown and indeed hard to predict. However, the cost-effectiveness of process improvements is of paramount importance and the question how profitable certain activities are needs to be answered.Within a large-scale commercial organization, we were challanged with the task to quantify the economic benefit of isolated test and development environments. To answer this question we defined a generic process model based on absorbing Markov chains that allows to analyze the economic benefit of software process variations. This model exposes conflicts between process steps and reiterations of development activities and thereby provides a highly flexible tool for the investigation of the effects of changes to a development process on its overall performance. This model was used to predict the impact of isolated testing on the overall effort and duration of projects at BMW. The results obtained correspond well with the perception of experienced developers and gives a detailed explanation for the effects. Besides this, it can be used to analyze various other economic aspects of software development processes and yields an interesting alternative for cost estimation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1007/978-3-540-72426-1_22
ICSP
Keywords
Field
DocType
development activity,software process variation,process step,economic impact,economic benefit,generic process model,development process,development environment,process improvement,software development process,certain development process,cost estimation,absorbing markov chain,process simulation,profitability,software process,process model
Economic impact analysis,Iterative and incremental development,Markov chain,Risk analysis (engineering),Cost estimate,Software development process,Engineering,Empirical process (process control model),Design process,Goal-Driven Software Development Process,Management science
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
4470
0302-9743
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
18
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Florian Deissenboeck177035.84
Markus Pizka226020.24