Problem 1
Under what circumstances might a company justifiably charge a much higher price for a software system than the software cost estimate plus a reasonable profit margin?
Problem 2
Explain why the process of project planning is iterative and why a plan must be continually reviewed during a software project.
Problem 3
Briefly explain the purpose of each of the sections in a software project plan.
Problem 4
Cost estimates are inherently risky, irrespective of the estimation technique used. Suggest four ways in which the risk in a cost estimate can be reduced.
Problem 7
The XP planning game is based around 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.
Problem 8
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 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. 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.
Problem 9
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.
Problem 10
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?
