RE: COCOMO project cost metrics for Saxon and XQilla

It would easily have taken 50 person years to write Saxon using a
conventional large-team approach - except that the large team would not
actually have delivered the same product.

Solo programming, like solo mountaineering, is probably 10 times more
efficient (but also much more risky) than the conventional large-team
approach.

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Justin Johansson [mailto:procode@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 02 February 2010 14:57
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  COCOMO project cost metrics for Saxon and XQilla
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Having just happened across these COCOMO metrics*** on Ohloh 
> for Saxon and XQilla XSLT/XQuery/XPath products/projects, I 
> thought the list might be interested in the "bean count" 
> estimates assuming a developer salary of $55000 p.a. to write 
> these projects from scratch.
> 
> *** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO
> 
> For Saxon (and presumably this just the Open Source Non-SA codebase)
> 
> http://www.ohloh.net/p/saxon
> 
> 50 Person Years  $ 2,743,467
> 
> And for XQilla
> 
> http://www.ohloh.net/p/xqilla
> 
> 35 Person Years  $ 1,899,031
> 
> Obviously it's anyone's guess if there's more than zero 
> significant digits in the $ values let alone 7 digits!  
> Actually I stumbled across the XQilla page first and, given 
> the friendly URL, took a stab at seeing if Saxon was there too. 
> And it was!
> 
> Any comments, people?
> 
> Cheers,
> Justin Johansson