Successful software projects need to deal with people and economic considerations, as well as technical considerations. The learning objectives of this course are to enable the student to understand the fundamental principles underlying software management and economics; to analyze management situations via case studies; to analyze software cost/schedule tradeoff issues via software cost estimation tools and microeconomic techniques; and to apply the principles and techniques to practical situations. CS510 is one of the mainstream courses in the Master of Science in Computer Science with specialization in Software Engineering.This year, the course's special focus will be on rapid application development (RAD), a critical success factor for many projects, and on emerging agile methods for realizing RAD.
Course Schedule
Weeks 1-6: Software management and economics goals and issues. Software life cycle process models. Software cost and schedule estimation; tradeoff and management option analysis. Business-case and economic analysis of software products and product lines. Management and economics of RAD and agile methods.
Weeks 7-10: Relevant microeconomic concepts: production functions, economies of scale, present value, constrained optimization, statistical decision theory, risk, and the value of information. Software risk management.
Weeks 11-14: Theories of management and their application to software projects. People considerations: motivation, win conditions, leadership, teambuilding, group dynamics. Software life-cycle planning and control; software process model determination; development and content of project plans; project monitoring and control. Software process maturity models and continuous process improvement. Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software management and economics.
Basis of grade: Final exam: 25%; 2 midterms: 25%; Homework exercises: 50%.
Textbooks: Boehm et al., Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO™ II, Prentice Hall, 2000; DeMarco and Lister, Peopleware(2nd Ed) , Dorset House, 1999; Reifer Business Case Analysis , Addison Wesley, 2001.
Time and Location: Monday and Wednesday, 8:30-9:50am, OHE 122
Instructor: Prof. Barry Boehm, SAL 328, (213) 740-8163, Fax (213) 740-4927;boehm@sunset.usc.edu
Office Hours.Monday 11:30AM - 1:00PM and Wednesday 10:00AM - 12:00PM, or by appointment
Teaching Assistant: Ye Yang, SAL 330, (213) 740-6470;yangy@sunset.usc.edu
TA Office Hours.Monday and
Wednesday, 10:00AM - 12:00PM or by appointment