Hardware-software Tradeoffs In Reliable Software Development
Rein Türn · 2005
Advances in computer technology are offering opportunities for innovative hardware-software tradeoffs for reducing system development costs and improving software reliability and performance. However, some project managers are not yet taking full advantage of these opportunities. They tend to proceed immediately to hardware specification and acquisition, and only later turn to software planning and design. The likely outcome is cost and schedule overruns, inefficient software structures, inadequate performance, and poor soft- ware reliability. An approach more apt to produce satisfactory results is to generate hardware and software specifications together as a synergistic whole, and then acquire the two as balanced and compatible parts of the system's architecture. This paper addresses hardware-software tradeoff oppor- tunities, computer tools for tradeoff analyses, and a management approach.