Chapter 11. The Power of the Trade-Off

The multiplicative relationship of effort and time in terms of size, quality level, and process productivity, developed in Chapter 7 and cited at the end of Chapter 10, tells us three things:

• For a product of a given (estimated) size, to be built at some quality level by a software organization of a given process productivity, the relationship does not provide a single value of effort or time. Rather, because of the multiplicative relationship between the two, there is a series of values from which estimators must select the time-effort pair to use. The values of time and effort are related so that, for instance, if the estimators increase the time they allow, the relationship reduces the effort (by reducing ...

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