Scenario:
You have just joined international Borandicata Independent Direct (iBID) TV Company which gives educational television programmes to subscribers. The company is based in USA however has offices in Europe and India. The television programming content is sourced from a number of other film and television outlets comprising the BBC, Discovery, and National Geographic and other content providers worldwide. iBID creates very few of its own programmers and relies heavily on buy and repackaging of existing content. iBID has recently started to incorporate lecture material from University courses and is in negotiation with various universities in Europe, North America and Asia to give support for “distance learning” programmes, based on this material. The present system is supported in two ways: satelilte and web, the first of that has been the standard means of content delivery for iBID since it foundation in 2001. That is, subscribers can register as pay-per-view customers by using a satellite dish, streaming content to their television sets. This was the original incarnation of the iBID TV channel, but now, in 2012, it accounts for only approximately 25% of its revenue.
Recently, the company took a new Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Springaniel Jones. His predecessor, Luckjoy Mantelpreece, led development of a subscription-based web portal, through that customer could view and download content, both as yearly subscriptions and in pay-per-view mode. In 3 years (from 2008 to 2011), this means of delivery grew from
0% to 75% of the revenue of the company supporting a significant growth in technical and other staff at iBID.
You have freshly joined iBID, working in its San Francisco office, having graduated with first class honors from University of London external programme. Dr. Jones has asked you to examine the development of a smart phone app to give a further distribution mechanism for iBID’s programming. Dr. Jones stipulates that the new app should be offered for users of Android, Samsung, and Apple smart devices. It must let for content to be downloaded and viewed and for integration with twitter and facebook so that customers can recommend content to others by their on-line social networks.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of iBID, Ms. Sue Yue Zhang, is extremely keen to employ social media as a manner of raising awareness of iBID and its services and to build up a connected customer network. iBID has a regular twitter feed and a facebook page. The twitter feed gives pointers to free snippets of content and has attracted 114,000 followers in its first year of operation. However, the facebook page is far less successful.
Your task is to lead a team of developers who will develop the app for iBID. Dr. Jones is a traditionally-trained software engineer, who has worked in the software industry for over 30 years, starting at NASA in 1980 and moving through Oracle (in 1990) to IBM in 2002. Dr.
Jones joined iBID as CTO in 2010.
Task 1
Discover the stake holders and the relationships between them.
Dr. Jones has asked you to employ function point analysis and COCOMO to estimate the project effort. He used such techniques extensively himself in his preceding companies and regards them as very useful.
Task 2
Estimate the number of function points included in the proposed system. Elucidate the manner you arrived at the estimate and justify the choices you make. Give a lower and upper bound on the estimate and explain and justify how you arrived at each bound; what choices and sub estimates did you make? Comment on any difficulties you experienced in applying a well-established technique (function point analysis) to a latest software development paradigm (app development).
Task 3
Use COCOMO cost estimation model to create an estimate of the effort of the project in person months. Comment on the suitability of COCOMO as a means of estimating project effort.