The Economics of Iterative Software Development by Walker Royce, Kurt Bittner and Mike Perrow

The beginning of the book describes the development process, providing a two pages description of COCOMO in the middle of it, and proposes way to improve it. The solutions focus mainly on an initial emphasis on architecture and modeling (naturally it is UML with some tools) associated with the recommendation for code reuse or component integration.

I was hoping to find more useful material in the part dealing with “practical measurement for software engineering”. However, the material is arranged around RUP phases and I found only one metric formula in the 50 pages devoted to this topic. There is some interesting content in this part, but it is only very high level.

This short book is close to be only a white paper for the IBM Rational Unified Process approach. It contains some interesting material for a software development manager wanting to think about introducing metrics, but its biased IBM approach and lack of directly useful content make it awkward for the experienced development professionals.

Reference

“The Economics of Iterative Software Development”, Walker Royce, Kurt Bittner and Mike Perrow, Addison-Wesley, 171 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-50935-2