The Cost of Co-ordination in Software Engineering

Software engineering is based on many interdependent processes involving many interacting stakeholders with conflicting interests and points of view. The management of dependencies between stakeholders activities corresponds to the co-ordination process. This process plays a key role in software engineering notably because of the large use of networks, distributed computing and groupware technology. Nevertheless, software cost estimation continues to be a weak link in software project management. In particular, coordination activities are neglected by well established cost estimation methods and tools, which stress only the technical aspects related to development and maintenance of software systems. In this paper, we propose a framework for estimating the cost of co-ordination activities inherent in software engineering. This framework defines the concept of coordination in software engineering and proposes a typology of co-ordination tasks. By another way, the framework described in this paper provides an econometric model based upon the OLS techniques to analyse and predict the cost of co-ordination tasks. Such a model is useful since it may contribute to estimate more accurately the effort and the schedule of new software projects by taking into account non-technical tasks.