& Research Suite Release 10

The data in the Repository projects have come from over twenty-five countries, with 60% of the projects being less than 7 years old. This is what makes the ISBSG Repository unique. A broad range of project types from many industries and many business areas are available for you to use for estimating, benchmarking, trend awareness, comparison of platforms/languages/tools or assisting your software process improvement program.

The ISBSG Data - Data on more than 4,100 projects is supplied on an Excel spreadsheet. Some highlights from the data are:

• Almost 100 programming languages are represented. Major languages are COBOL, C/C++/C#, Visual Basic, Java/J2EE/Javascript, PL/I, PL/SQL, Oracle, SQL, Natural, Access, Powerbuilder, ASP, and Lotus Notes.

• Around 100 different application types are now recorded in the Repository

• There is significant data on almost 20 different techniques and approaches

To find out what is on the CD before you buy, download the demographics and data field descriptions from: www.isbsg.org. 

The ISBSG Early Estimate Checker Tool uses regression tables based on the ISBSG data to provide you with an early lifecycle check of your project estimate.

ISBSG Project Data

The CD contains a large body of data about completed software projects. You can use this data set to help you manage your IT in many ways including:

• Benchmarking your project or organisation against similar projects, or perhaps against the whole data set

• Assisting you with estimating your own software development projects

• Assisting you in evaluating the benefits of software or hardware platforms and development techniques.

• Software development and engineering research.

The ISBSG Early Estimate Checker Tool

The ISBSG Early Estimate Checker Tool is a software tool that utilises the ISBSG data on the CD with regression analysis to quickly generate “ball park” estimates of the work effort and elapsed time, (duration), plus project delivery rate and speed of delivery required for a software development project. These estimates can be used as a check of your own estimate.

The tool allows a user to enter the project size, expressed in IFPUG function points and a combination of development platform, primary programming language type and development type in order to generate estimates.

In addition to generating estimates that indicate the most likely values for project work effort and elapsed time, the tool provides a confidence interval function that can be used to generate estimate ranges. These estimate ranges can be used to highlight the range of values from most conservative to most optimistic that can be expected to be achieved for a particular software project. The tool also provides an extensive range of graphs plus details of the regression equations used to generate its estimates.

Notes:

1. The Early Estimate Checker is a “White Box” tool, it uses the data on the CD and documented rules and equations that you can verify.

2. The CD contains both “raw” and normalised effort data, the later providing a higher level of data integrity and usefulness.

3. The ISBSG recommends the use of multiple estimation approaches, preferably combining Micro and Macro techniques.

The Benchmark Books

This is an essential reference book for all IT professionals involved in the planning, management and benchmarking of software development and enhancement projects, and for teachers of software engineering subjects and related topics. In this release we have provided the following analyses to assist with project planning.

• The breakdown of effort by project phase
• The breakdown of effort by role for projects
• The Impact of Techniques & Tools
• Web projects compared to non web projects
• The impact of re-use in projects

The information in this book will help with:

• Estimating and planning the effort in each of your project phases
• Establishing the likely project effort for each of the project resources
• The usefulness of various techniques and tools
• What you should allow for if you are planning and managing a web project
• The impact of employing a re-use strategy

Order Your Copy

To order your copy of the: ISBSG Estimating, Benchmarking & Research Suite R10, Fax this order form to: +61 3 9752 9270 or visit the ISBSG web site at: www.isbsg.org You can order on-line and get the 10% discount by selecting “DASMA” from the “Professional Membership” drop down list box.