Chapter 21Estimating User and Project Documentation

Every manager and cost-estimating specialist who deals with large applications needs to understand that a typical software system produces more than a hundred English words for every line of source code. The costs and schedules for creating these words are greater than the cost of actually writing the source code.

The software industry has developed three characteristics that are visibly distinct from almost every other industry:

Image Software is the most labor-intensive of any U.S. industry in terms of the amount of human effort required to create a product.

Software, being abstract, has become ...

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