Abstract:
Investigations of software development practices, processes, and techniques frequently report separately on the costs and benefits of a phenomenon under study, but rarely adequately address the combined bottom line implications. In particular, tensions between the quality and productivity effects are hard to reconcile, making objective, high-level insights elusive. For example, when would a practice that is believed to improve product quality, but incurs a developer productivity penalty economically feasible? In other words, under what conditions do the benefits outweigh the costs? Such questions can be tackled through synthesizing the combined effects and analyzing the resulting behaviors. In this light, the tutorial will present an approach that leverages well-known economic and financial concepts and techniques. The illustrated concepts and techniques can be used to wrap empirical findings related to software development practices and processes and evaluate software projects in terms of their cost-effectiveness. The tutorial is geared towards researchers and practitioners interested or involved in software processes, process improvement, project management, process/project measurement, and empirical software engineering.
Presenters:
Hakan Erdogmus is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Software. He is a software engineering researcher and consultant based in Ottawa, Canada, and owner of Kalemun Research Inc. Previously he was as a senior research officer in the Software Engineering Group of the Canadian National Research Council's Institute for Information Technology, where he worked from 1995 to 2009. His research focuses on software economics, software process, and agile software development. He has published and presented extensively on these topics. Mr. Erdogmus teaches graduate courses on software engineering economics at the University of Calgary, where he is an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is the 2003 recipient of the Eugene L. Grant Award given by the Engineering Economy division of the American Society for Engineering Education. He co-edited two books, Value-Based Software Engineering and Advances in Software Engineering, both published by Springer. Mr. Erdogmus holds a BSc degree in Computer Engineering from Bogazici Univerisity (Istanbul, 1986), an MSc degree in Computer Science from McGill University (Montreal, 1989) and a PhD in Telecommunications from INRS, Université du Québec (Montreal, 1994).