Effect of Schedule Compression on Project Effort

Schedule pressure is often faced by project managers and software developers who want to quickly deploy information systems. Typical strategies to compress project time scales might include adding more staff/personnel, investing in development tools, improving hardware, or improving development methods. The tradeoff between cost, schedule, and performance is one of the most important analyses performed during the planning stages of software development projects. In order to adequately compare the effects of these three constraints on the project it is essential to understand their individual influence on the project’s outcome. In this paper, we present an investigation into the effect of schedule compression on software project development effort and cost and show that people are generally optimistic when estimating the amount of schedule compression. This paper is divided into three sections. First, we follow the Ideal Effort Multiplier (IEM) analysis on the SCED cost driver of the COCOMO II model. Second, compare the real schedule compression ratio exhibited by 161 industry projects and the ratio represented by the SCED cost driver. Finally, based on the above analysis, a set of newly proposed SCED driver ratings for COCOMO II are introduced which show an improvement of 6% in the model estimating accuracy.