On Mon, Nov 16, 1998 at 10:14:28PM -0500, Bob Munck wrote:
> Huh? You call people "points?"
I don't, but that's the terminology I learned while at a
certain Three Initial Company. (Anybody else read "Eyebeam"?)
I"m guessing that you meant it differently, and that maybe
what I learned was peculiar to that place...which was peculiar
enough, anyway. ;-)
> How do you do a Cocomo costing model without knowing about function points?
Simple: I don't. I don't have a clue what a Cocomo costing model is.
> How do you negotiate a contract with a customer if you don't know
> how much it's going to cost to develop the software?
I wing it.
Yep. I make it up out of thin air.
(I actually once did estimates for a project using a dartboard. I knew
that nobody of consequence would pay any attention to them, that they'd
be ignored as soon as they hit paper, and that it was all so much PHB
nonsense anyway, so why expend any effort on it? I was wrong:
they were ignored *before* they hit paper.)
More seriously, based on what I have observed, my estimates based on
seat-of-the-pants feel have as much chance of being accurate or inaccurate
as estimates based on extensive analysis, trends, models, etc.
This either means that I have a pretty decent "feel" for what I'm doing,
or that I'm really bad at it, but the models etc. are just as bad. ;-)
I tend to think it's some of both.
Regardless: applying this sort of analysis to open-source software
like Linux is pointless: it's *free*. AFAIK, the traditional
ways of evaluating cost don't deal with a gift economy, and that
seems to be what is at work here.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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