Chapter 2The Origins of Software Cost Estimation

The software industry began in the 1950s. Almost immediately software estimation started to cause problems. In the 1960s when computers began to be used for business purposes by corporations, software-estimation problems started to attract top-management attention. Software projects soon gained a reputation for having more cost and schedule overruns than any other aspect of business operations. Consequently, a number of large corporations began to assign specialists to look for improved methods of software-cost estimation.

Software development and maintenance are both difficult domains for cost-estimation purposes. Software is highly labor-intensive, so individual human variances exert a major ...

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