Software Economics

Catalog description

In addition to developing software using an organization's own software development staff, new approaches for the acquisition of software systems continue to emerge and to be adopted. This course provides students with the necessary foundational knowledge to compare, evaluate, and assess, from financial and economic perspectives, the alternatives for developing or acquiring software systems. Topics include motivations for studying software economics, basic financial and economic concepts, measurements of software development productivity and software quality, software development cost estimation models, modeling software development and deployment activities, and acquisition alternatives such as open source, purchase, lease, cloud, and outsourcing.