A discussion is presented of the two primary ways of understanding software costs. The black-box or influence-function approach provides useful experimental and observational insights on the relative software productivity and quality leverage of various management, technical, environmental, and personnel options. The glass-box or cost distribution approach helps identify strategies for integrated software productivity and quality improvement programs using such structures as the value chain and the software productivity opportunity tree. The individual strategies for improving software productivity are identified. Issues related to software costs and controlling them are examined and discussed. It is pointed out that a good framework of techniques exists for controlling software budgets, schedules, and work completed, but that a great deal of further progress is needed to provide an overall set of planning and control techniques covering software product qualities and end-user system objectives. >

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Understanding and controlling software costs

This article discusses avenues of improving productivity for both custom and mass-produced software. Some of the topics covered are: The importance of improving software productivity, measuring software productivity, analyzing software productivity, improving and indicating trends in software productivity

Improving Software Productivity

We address the following questions for object-oriented programming:What is it?What are its goals?What are its origins?What are its paradigms?What are its design alternatives?What are its models of concurrency?What are its formal computational models?What comes after object-oriented programming?Starting from software engineering goals, we examine the origins and paradigms of object-oriented programming, explore its language design alternatives, consider its models of concurrency, and review its mathematical models to make them accessible to nonmathematical readers. Finally, we briefly speculate on what may come after object-oriented programming and conclude that it is a robust component-based modeling paradigm that is both effective and fundamental. This paper expands on the OOPSLA 89 keynote talk.

Concepts and paradigms of object-oriented programming

Object-oriented programming techniques promote a new approach to software engineering in which reliable, open applications can be lar gely constructed, rather than programmed, by reusing “frameworks” [3] of plug-compatible software components. Although the dream of a components-based software industry is very old [9], only now does it appear that we are close to realizing the dream. The reason for this is twofold: • Modern applications are increasingly open in terms of topology, platform and evolution, and so the need for a component-oriented approach to development is even more acute than in the past; • Objects provide an organizational paradigm for decomposing large applications into cooperating objects as well as a reuse paradigm for composing applications from pre-packaged software components. Despite the contributions of object-oriented technology , there are several open research problems that must be resolved to reach the goal of ef f ctive component-oriented development. First, object-oriented mechanisms for composition and reuse must be cleanly integrated with other features, such as concurrency , persistence and distribution. Second, ef fective reuse of software presupposes the existence of tools to support the organisation and retrieval of components according to application requirements and the interactive construction of running applications from components. Third, the design of reusable frameworks is an iterative, evolutionary process, so it is necessary to manage software and software information in such a way that designs and implementations can evolve gracefully. Finally, present object-oriented methodologies do not explicitly address the design of reusable frameworks. Not only the languages and tools, but the economics, methods and culture of software development must ultimately adapt to a new evolutionary software life-cycle if we are to realize the benefits of large-scale software reuse [2][17].

Component-oriented software development

The RSL couples a passive database with interactive design tools to make reuse an integral part of the software development process.

The reusable software library

Each section of this four-part article deals with a different aspect of capital-intensive software technology. Together, they present an integrated view of the subject.

P. Wegner

Papers

Capital-Intensive Software Technology

Capital-intensive software technology