Technical Reports
USC-CSE-91-501
Barry Boehm, "Economic Analysis of Software Technology Investments," Analytical Methods in Software Engineering Economics, T. Gulledge and W. Hutzler (ed.), Springer-Verlag, 1993 (pdf)
Many large organizations are finding that:
Software technology is increasingly critical to their future organizational performance.
Organizational expenditures on software are increasing.
Investments in software technology provide opportunities to reduce software costs and increase organizational performance.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is one such organization. It has embarked on the development of a DoD Software Technology Strategy (SWTS)[Boehm91a] to:
Identify its current and future software technology needs.
Analyze and adjust its current software technology investment portfolio to better meet DoD needs.
Formulate alternative DoD software technology investment portfolios, and analyze them with respect to DoD needs and estimated cost savings.
This paper summarizes one of several analyses undertaken to evaluate alternative DoD software technology investment portfolios. The analysis estimates the DoD software cost savings likely to result from alternative levels of DoD investment and calculates the resulting estimated returns on investment (ROI).
The dollar figures used in this paper represent current and proposed alternative technology investment and savings figures used at one stage of the development of the SWTS. At this point, they are representative of SWTS data and conclusions, but not necessarily accurate with respect to the final figures to be used in the SWTS.
Added June 24th, 2008
USC-CSE-91-500
Barry Boehm, "Software Risk Management: Principles and Practices," original version of IEEE Software, Volume 8, Issue 1, January 1991, pp. 32-41 (pdf)
Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S.S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project [I].
Most post-mortems of these software disaster projects have indicated that their problems would have been avoided or strongly reduced if there had been an explicit early concern with identifying and resolving their high-risk elements. Frequently, these projects were swept along by a tide of optimistic enthusiasm during their early phases, which caused them to miss some clear signals of high-risk issues which proved to be the project's downfall later.
Enthusiasm for new software capabilities is a good thing. But it needs to be tempered with a concern for early identification and resolution of a project's high-risk elements, so that people can get these resolved early and then focus their enthusiasm and energy on the positive aspects of their software product.
Added June 24th, 2008
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