The ROI of systems engineering: Some quantitative results for software-intensive systems

Barry Boehm; Ricardo Valerdi; Eric Honour

doi:10.1002/sys.20096

The ROI of systems engineering: Some quantitative results for software-intensive systems

Barry Boehm, Ricardo Valerdi, Eric Honour

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

62 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents quantitative results on the return on investment of systems engineering (SE-ROI) from an analysis of the 161 software projects in the COCOMO II database. The analysis shows that, after normalizing for the effects of other cost drivers, the cost difference between projects doing a minimal job of software systems engineering-as measured by the thoroughness of its architecture definition and risk resolution-and projects doing a very thorough job was 18% for small projects and 92% for very large software projects as measured in lines of code. The paper also presents applications of these results to project experience in determining "how much up front systems engineering is enough" for baseline versions of smaller and larger software projects, for both ROI-driven internal projects and schedule-driven outsourced systems of systems projects.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	221-234
Number of pages	14
Journal	Systems Engineering
Volume	11
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.20096
State	Published - Sep 2008
Externally published	Yes

Keywords

COCOMO
COSYSMO
Return on investment
Systems architecting
Systems engineering measurement
Value of systems engineering

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Hardware and Architecture
Computer Networks and Communications

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10.1002/sys.20096

Cite this

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The ROI of systems engineering: Some quantitative results for software-intensive systems

Abstract

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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