The Economics of Software Dependability

November 12, 2004
Barry Boehm | University of Southern California

In most software applications, investments in software dependability compete with investments in such alternate capabilities as functionality, response time, adaptability, and speed of development. Investigating the tradeoffs among these sources of investment raises a number of significant questions about the nature of software dependability and its interactions with other desired software capabilities. These questions include:

What software capabilities are your various stakeholders really depending on (liveness, responsiveness, quality of service)? What happens when these aspects of “dependability” conflict?
Is success in the marketplace a monotone function of achieved dependability?
Is quality really free in all situations? How can one determine how much investment in dependability is enough in a given situation?
Are there ways to quantify the tradeoffs among schedule, cost, and dependability? Is “faster, cheaper, better” really achievable?
Many current software dependability-related techniques assume that every requirement, use case, test case, and defect is equally important. How cost-effective are such value-neutral methods?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of emerging “agile methods” in coping with dependability-related investments?

This talk will explore these and related questions from the perspective of the emerging discipline of Value-Based Software Engineering. It will show that, at least in many cases, reasoning about the economics of software dependability can lead to more satisfactory outcomes than will the application of value-neutral techniques.

Speaker Details

Dr. Barry Boehm is the TRW Professor of Software Engineering in the Computer Science Department at USC, and Director of the USC Center for Software Engineering.He served within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) from 1989 to 1992 as director of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Office and as director of the DDR&E Software and Computer Technology Office. He worked at TRW from 1973 to 1989, culminating as chief scientist of the Defense Systems Group, and at the Rand Corporation from 1959 to 1973, culminating as head of the Information Sciences Department. He entered the software field at General Dynamics in 1955.His current research interests involve recasting software engineering into a value-based framework, including processes, methods, and tools for value-based software definition, architecting, development, and validation. His contributions to the field include the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), the Spiral Model of the software process, and the Theory W (win-win) approach to software management and requirements determination. He is a Fellow of the primary professional societies in computing (ACM), aerospace (AIAA), electronics (IEEE), and systems engineering (INCOSE), and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.