New data supporting the software project costing formulas
Victor B. Schneider · 2005
Halstead's Software Science formulas and the Air Force's Rome Air Development Center software effort data base are used to derive a software project effort estimator. This estimator is: T = 94S/sup 2/ and T =381/sup 2/ where T =total programmer and software engineer months charged to the project S = thousands of statements of source Fortran, excluding comments I = thousands of assembly language source statements, excluding comments Overall project effort is obtained by applying the estimator on a subroutine by subroutine basis and adding the results. On a data base of 21 projects, ranging in size from 5, 000 to 164, 000 delivered machine instructions, a correlation coefficient of 0. 64 was obtained between data and estin-,Lator. Grouping projects together in twos and threes raised the corre3aAion coefficient to 0. 91 .