ABSTRACT
Software development and maintenance are among the most labor-intensive occupations in human history. A study commissioned by AT&T and carried out by the author and his colleagues found a total of 116 different software occupation groups such as business analysts, software engineers, testers, software quality assurance, technical writers, and agile coaches. Alarmingly, the largest increase in occupation groups was that concerned with cyber-security due to the huge increase in cybercrime and looming threats of cyber warfare. Selecting the optimal staff size for a specific project is one of the more complex calculations of parametric estimating tools such as Software Risk Master (SRM) and the other parametric estimation tools. The literature on pair programming is woefully inadequate because it only compares individual programmers to pairs and ignores other factors such as inspections, static analysis, automated proofs, requirements models, and many other modern quality techniques.
