COMS W3156: Software Engineering, Fall 2001 Lecture #10: Planning and Estimation Janak J Parekh

Administrativia v1.0 of the requirements out – fewer changes now Rose installed as of yesterday – printing problems –Windows Rose access HW1 due now; HW2 out tonight Webboard – use it!

Next class How did we come up with the requirements? Continue networking discussion

Today’s class Planning and estimation discussion –Look at MS Project if some time JDOM Project: sample XML files

Planning and Estimation Very hard to do, but we need it –“How much will it cost? Can you stick to it?” –“How long will it take?” –Open-source: “It’ll be released when it’s done” Rapid prototype/requirements/specifications often insufficient to determine cost estimate Internal vs. External Cost

Challenges Human factor –Difference of up to 28:1 between pairs of programmers –Even among average experienced programmers, ratio is 5:1 –Will they stick around? How to measure product? –Code measures are highly inaccurate, language- specific, comments KLOC and KDSI

Product size Files, flows, processes (van der Poel, Schach): data-oriented, but never extended to databases Function points (Albrecht): deal with various functional abstraction properties Neither account for maintenance work

Cost estimation Compare to existing products by experts –Somewhat ambiguous –Worse than real-estate valuation processes Bottom-up approach –Estimate per low-level component –Total greater than sum of products Algorithmic –COCOMO

COCOMO Very sophisticated metric: book only outlines “intermediate COCOMO” Nominal effort in person-months times 15 multipliers Aargh! But it worked in the 80’s (within 20%)

COCOMO II Attempt to accommodate modern software engineering techniques, OO, etc. Even more complex COCOMO and COCOMO II are really out of the scope of this course –Although students did it before…

Software Project Management Plan Not part of the lifecycle, per se: more business-side of things –Work to be done –Resources with which to do –Money to pay for all Concept of resources and work IEEE standard

Other issues (I) Testing: SPMP’s must include a test plan and cost estimates Object-Oriented Planning: structured planning works, excluding reuse –Reusable components: about 3 times more difficult to build Training requirements: developers need training too!

Other issues (II) Documentation: wide variety, but time- consuming: often more time spent on documentation than code; SPMP requires documentation standards CASE tools –Spreadsheets –MS Project

JDOM “Java representation of XML document” –Useable with SAX = Simple API for XML and DOM = Document Object Model, but simpler Comes with Xerces parser built-in ( May be part of standard Java in near future: on standards track Allows you to parse XML into a simple Java data structure, edit said data structure, and output XML from it

To use JDOM Input –Point JDOM at a file, string, URL, InputStream –Tell it to parse (SAXBuilder or DOMBuilder) –Use data structure Output –Create data structure –Use XMLOutputter to output to String, InputStream, some others That’s really it: let’s look at Phil’s example

What does this mean for you? You won’t do planning and estimation; take 4156 if you’re dying to know JDOM a useful toolkit for handling XML: will probably need for HW2

Project Sidebar: focus on your stuff, not others’ Off to XML-example-land