Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!hwcs!styri From: styri@cs.hw.ac.uk (Yu No Hoo) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: COCOMO Message-ID: <3248@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> Date: 16 Jun 91 17:55:54 GMT References: Sender: news@cs.hw.ac.uk Distribution: comp Organization: Globetrotters and Bohemians, Unlimited Lines: 34 In article ahl@technix.oz.au (Tony Landells) writes: >I'm looking for opinions of COCOMO. I don't have my notes here, but I think I remember that some of the parameters you feed into COCOMO are rather old-fashioned in a UNIC/C environment. (They made me think of COBOL.) However, they force you to reason about both your application and your resources. > [...] they mentioned it as a methodology which >produces a lot of useful figures, but the comments were accompnied by >the disclaimer "I haven't used it, but people that do seem to think >it's pretty good". Above disclaimer goes for me, but I would restrict the first statement to "a lot of figures". Some may not be useful, but the intelligent manager will know which to use. I think it requires some practise to get it right. >I believe it's completely described in "Sofware Engineering Economics" >by B.W.Boehm, Prentice-Hall 1987; but the book isn't readily available >here in Australia (lead time for order is 12-14 weeks) and it is >extremely expensive, so... Buy it! Barry Boehm is worth reading. If your field is QA (or you are a project manager) I would also recommend an IEEE-CS tutorial edited by mr. Boehm: "Software Risk Management". ---------------------- Haakon Styri Dept. of Comp. Sci. ARPA: styri@cs.hw.ac.uk Heriot-Watt University X-400: C=gb;PRMD=uk.ac;O=hw;OU=cs;S=styri Edinburgh, Scotland