Additional Resources

cc2e.com/2768

Use the following resources to investigate this chapter's subject further:

Boehm, Barry and Richard Turner. Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2004. Boehm and Turner describe how project size affects the use of agile and plan-driven methods, along with other agile and plandriven issues.

Cockburn, Alistair. Agile Software Development. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2002. Chapter 4 discusses issues involved in selecting appropriate project methodologies, including project size. Chapter 6 introduces Cockburn's Crystal Methodologies, which are defined approaches for developing projects of various sizes and degrees of criticality.

Boehm, Barry W. Software Engineering Economics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981. Boehm's book is an extensive treatment of the cost, productivity, and quality ramifications of project size and other variables in the software-development process. It includes discussions of the effect of size on construction and other activities. Chapter 11 is an excellent explanation of software's diseconomies of scale. Other information on project size is spread throughout the book. Boehm's 2000 book Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II contains much more up-to-date information on Boehm's Cocomo estimating model, but the earlier book provides more in-depth background discussions that are still relevant.

Jones, Capers. Estimating Software Costs. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1998. This book is packed with tables and graphs that dissect the sources of software development productivity. For the impact of project size specifically, Jones's 1986 book, Programming Productivity, contains an excellent discussion in the section titled "The Impact of Program Size" in Chapter 3.

Brooks, Frederick P., Jr. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2d ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Brooks was the manager of IBM's OS/360 development, a mammoth project that took 5000 staff-years. He discusses management issues pertaining to small and large teams and presents a particularly vivid account of chief-programmer teams in this engaging collection of essays.

DeGrace, Peter, and Leslie Stahl. Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions: A Catalogue of Modern Software Engineering Paradigms. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Yourdon Press, 1990. As the title suggests, this book catalogs approaches to developing software. As noted throughout this chapter, your approach needs to vary as the size of the project varies, and DeGrace and Stahl make that point clearly. The section titled "Attenuating and Truncating" in Chapter 5 discusses customizing software-development processes based on project size and formality. The book includes descriptions of models from NASA and the Department of Defense and a remarkable number of edifying illustrations.

Jones, T. Capers. "Program Quality and Programmer Productivity." IBM Technical Report TR 02.764 (January 1977): 42 78. Also available in Jones's Tutorial: Programming Productivity: Issues for the Eighties, 2d ed. Los Angeles, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1986. This paper contains the first in-depth analysis of the reasons large projects have different spending patterns than small ones. It's a thorough discussion of the differences between large and small projects, including requirements and quality-assurance measures. It's dated but still interesting.