> >> Gustav Karner has done research while at Rational Software on estimating >> software construction costs based on use cases. The idea of weighting >> objects due to complexity and a useful set of factors to consider when >> determining complexity make this kind of interesting. His ideas are >> condensed at the following url. > >Fascinating work, and I agree with his conclusion, paraphased as "this >might work." "Complexity" however you choose to define it, is a good >way to estimate a project. A simple application you choose to >implement in a language you haven't worked in before will be more >complex than one you've done a dozen times before. The trick is >identifying all of the factors involved. >
Basically what he seems to be doing is inputting factored weights for actors (external systems, hardware and humans), use cases (complexity determined by the number of pathways), technical factors (distributed system, response and throughput performance objectives, reusable code, easy installation, portable, concurrent, training required etc) and project participants (basically the experience level of the project participants, difficulty of the programming language, motivation etc.). This is all combined in a weighted value system which is then multiplied by 20 to determine the person-hours required. Correct me if I'm wrong but if number of tables fit at all into this it would be as a simple external system actor that the application had to interact with. The number of different types of human actors (customer, billing clerk etc) would have a much heavier weight in determining the cost than the number of tables. The heaviest weightings though go to the use cases and the number of pathways (basically each use case has a primary pathway, usually an alternate pathway or two and an exception pathway or error condition). Each element of CRUD would seem to require a different pathway. Complexity is determined by the number of different things an object has to do. By the way if anyone is interested, Geri Schneider in her book _Applying Use Cases_ deals with Karner's ideas and suggests some improvements; And an Appendix to Paul R Reed's _Developing Applications with Visual Basic and UML_ addresses Karner's research and was actually where I first came across it. I believe there is a Java version of this book too. These are all part of Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series. Graham. _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
