Chapter 23

Describe the factors that affect software pricing. Define the “pricing to win” approach in software pricing.

Explain why the process of project planning is iterative and why a plan must be continually reviewed during a software project.

Define project scheduling. What are the things to be considered while estimating schedules?

The planning game is based on the notion of planning to implement the stories that represent the system requirements. Explain the potential problems with this approach when software has high performance or dependability requirements.

A software manager is in charge of the development of a safety-critical software system, which is designed to control a radiotherapy machine to treat patients suffering from cancer. This system is embedded in the machine and must run on a special-purpose processor with a fixed amount of memory (256 Mbytes). The machine communicates with a patient database system to obtain the details of the patient and, after treatment, automatically records the Explain why this estimate should be adjusted to take project, personnel, product, and organizational factors into account. Suggest four factors that might have significant effects on the initial COCOMO estimate and propose possible values for these factors. Justify why you have included each factor.

Some very large software projects involve writing millions of lines of code. Explain why the effort estimation models, such as COCOMO, might not work well when applied to very large systems.

Is it ethical for a company to quote a low price for a software contract knowing that the requirements are ambiguous and that they can charge a high price for subsequent changes requested by the customer? radiation dose delivered and other treatment details in the database. The COCOMO method is used to estimate the effort required to develop this system, and an estimate of 26 person-months is computed. All cost driver multipliers were set to 1 when making this estimate.