Project Name: Estimation Tool Interfaces

Sponsor:
Gerrit Klaschke (email: klaschkeg@costxpert.com; tel: 619-670-6168)

Partners:
John Amacker (email: amackerj@costxpert.com ; tel: 619-670-6168)
Ray Madachy (email: madachy@usc.edu)

Background:
This proof-of-concept project shall develop working interfaces between an estimation tool, software development and project management tools. The application will read software size data for a project from Rational development tools, perform a top-level cost and schedule estimate, populate a work breakdown structure (WBS) with the estimation results and export the WBS as a project plan to Microsoft Project. All data will be written to a database.

Problem:
This project will mitigate tool interface risks. Critical information on implementation details of the interfaces will be gained as well as a working system for further exploration and possible product evolution. Rational Rose and Microsoft Project are the primary tools for evaluation.

Additional candidate tools to assess and possibly implement include Rational Requisite Pro and Rational Clearquest as sources of software requirements and Rational Dashboard as a bidirectional estimation interface. These additional tools will be evaluated on a time-available basis as the project unfolds.

The application shall extract use-case scenario data and other object measures from project designs in Rational Rose. The number and attributes of the scenarios, object metrics, and/or the number of requirements from other tools, will be used as software size input to the estimation algorithms. The top-level estimation algorithms will be simplified COCOMO II formulas for unadjusted effort and schedule. The application shall work with an MBASE WBS and other hierarchical WBSs provided by Cost Xpert.

The team will document the application programming interface (API) options, the API specifications, the implemented design and source in full detail for future implementations on alternative programming platforms, as applicable. It is currently understood that Rational interfaces can be implemented via text file transfers, the COM protocol and a J2EE programming interface. Cost Xpert already has a COM interface to Microsoft Project. The output database format is not yet specified. It may be spreadsheet readable or a specific database format.

Constraints:
None specified

Desired Deliverables:
None specified