Future Trends
Panel Discussion
Jairus Hihn
MEsA
22nd International Forum on COCOMO and Systems/Software Cost Modeling (2007)
Software Systems Trends
• We will see more and more systems that organically
evolve integrating over networks with Systems of
Systems characteristics
– Plug and play systems that were never originally designed
to work together
• Ever greater use of
– Line between systems and software will blur
– ‘programming approaches’ that do not need programmers
• graphics based
• Auto code generation
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Data mining and machine learning
Automation
Planning algorithms
More sophisticated fault protection
Agile like development processes
• All of these severely challenge traditional costing
approaches
Costing Trends
• Do we want to make ourselves better or improve the quality
of costing across the industry
– Dominant technique is bottom up estimates from engineers
– Engineers use analogy and WAG
• Deal better with COTS and SOS
• More dynamic models
– Calibration as part of estimation
• More integrated tools
– Cost, defects, risk
– Parametric and analogy
– Design and estimation
• Analogy based estimation
– Nearest Neighbour
– Also needs language support because people sue words
differently
– Integration of expert judgment and data
• Whatever we do we need to keep things as simple as
possible