Pricing via Functional Size: A Case Study of a Company’s Portfolio of 77 Outsourced Projects

by Huijgens, Hennie and Gousios, Georgios and van Deursen, Arie

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Abstract

A medium-sized west-European telecom company experienced a worsening trend in performance, indicating that the organization did not learn from history, in combination with much time and energy spent on preparation and review of project proposals. In order to create more transparency in the supplier proposal process a pilot was started on Functional Size Measurement pricing (FSM-pricing). In this paper, we evaluate the implementation of FSM-pricing in the software engineering domain of the company, as an instrument useful in the context of software man- agement and supplier proposal pricing. We found that a statistical, evidence-based pricing approach for software engineering, as a single instrument (without a connection with expert judgment), can be used in the subject companies to create cost transparency and performance management of software project portfolios.

Bibtex record

@inproceedings{HGD15,
  author = {Huijgens, Hennie and Gousios, Georgios and van Deursen, Arie},
  title = {Pricing via Functional Size: A Case Study of a Company's Portfolio of 77 Outsourced Projects},
  booktitle = {2015 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {1--10},
  location = {Beijing, China},
  doi = {10.1109/ESEM.2015.7321211},
  month = oct,
  url = {/pub/pricing-via-functional-size.pdf}
}

The paper