« HowTo set the defaul... | Main | Bike to Work Day »
20050620 Monday June 20, 2005

AppFuse cost $78K to develop I somehow stumbled upon Koders.com this morning, where they have a cost-of-development based on LOC in the project's CVS repository. Apparently, AppFuse has cost around $78K to develop. Here are a few other project costs I discovered:

Are these costs accurate? Probably not, but it's still an interesting indicator. Posted in Java at Jun 20 2005, 09:20:53 AM MDT 7 Comments

Comments:

The estimation is probably done by Cocomo II. It was firstly published by Barry Boehm (you know...) and shall allow one to estimate the cost, effort, and schedule when planning a new software development activity. http://sunset.usc.edu/research/COCOMOII/

Posted by vanto on June 20, 2005 at 10:34 AM MDT #

These costs are totaly random and have nothing to do with the reality. If there were that easy to evaluate costs, than our life would be much easier and most of developers would have no deadline problems, cause an LOC estimation could always be done :).

Posted by Ahmed Mohombe on June 20, 2005 at 11:41 AM MDT #

Hi There,

An excerpt from the interview(http://www.vanwardtechnologies.com/bsletten01print.html) with an expert on USEFUL software code metrics.

=============================
Vanward: Yeah, I agree. I think past abuses are hard to forget. Lines of code doesn't equal productivity! Are there particular metrics you've found useful? Conversely, which ones do you find are useless?

Brian: I think a lot of metrics are useful depending on what your goals are. If you are trying to predict failure, the only metrics that seem to correlate even remotely are complexity, coupling and length of methods/classes. If you are trying to make software easier to maintain there are a ton of metrics that can be useful.

Robert Martin's metrics are useful for managing dependencies and validating that your class categories are appropriately decomposed on package boundaries. Cyclomatic complexity is great for identifying code for refactoring, adjusting your LOE guesstimates and determining how sufficient your test coverage is. Identifying violations of the Law of Demeter helps find unnecessary structural coupling between modules. Depth of inheritance is a reasonable measure of the cognitive load a developer needs to page in and the potential for conceptual entropy in the class decomposition.

As far as metrics that are useless, I've never found number of children (NOC) to make that much of a difference. SLOC is the most misused metric. I understand the desire for managers to be able to measure productivity, but SLOC basically measures typing volume. It doesn't factor in reuse, defects or design quality.
=============================
BR,
~A

Posted by Anjan Bacchu on June 20, 2005 at 12:07 PM MDT #

While I agree these statistics are completely subjective, it is interesting to see the estimated cost of Eclipse, which is more than 11 million! Wow! I certainly do hope that it lives up to its investment.

Posted by Dan Allen on June 20, 2005 at 12:47 PM MDT #

I wonder if the 78k is an accurate measure of how much is saved per project by using appfuse.

Posted by 64.170.69.114 on June 20, 2005 at 03:10 PM MDT #

Rails actually cost much less. It was developed as a side effect of the Basecamp project so it was relatively cheap and I think the investition has returned very quicky. Not mention thousand of people all over the world rescued by Rails from the messy overcomplicated java world. They are very happy people now and are making a great stressless Rails community. But it's good for you that you are still well paid for doing your job and there are people who like watching your shows. Take care. Mike

Posted by Mike March on June 21, 2005 at 12:20 AM MDT #

Hight time they outsource open source work to india. They could have finished POI for much less than $100K compared to $550K+ :D

Posted by 203.126.136.223 on June 23, 2005 at 02:02 AM MDT #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: Allowed
Click me to subscribe
Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
« December 2008
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
   
       
Today

Recent Entries

Tag Cloud

abbie acegi appfuse denver flex grails gwt hibernate jack java jsf linkedin maven myfaces oscon rails skiing spring springmvc struts struts2 tapestry travel webframeworks wicket