Life Cycle Cost Percentages of Weapons Systems
While at a conference this week I heard the presentation of a paper by Quentin Redman, Andrew Crepea, and George Stratton, all of Raytheon, that summarized the life cycle costs of various weapons systems. This table is reproduced below:
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Don’t Assume SaaS Is Cheaper
A very enlightening article by Leo King summarized a Gartner study that claims that Software As A Service (SaaS)
According to Gartner:
- SaaS is cheaper for the first two years
- Five year total cost of ownership is cheaper for on-site software due to accounting rules allowing depreciation of capital assets for on-site software
- SaaS is not necessarily quicker to implement.. As least one organization I know struggled for many months trying to get a SaaS CRM solution to provide the functionality of their prior in-house solution.
- There is another factor consideration that Gartner may not have considered…. The monthly or annual cost of software delivered as a service may have a much lower fee due to paying by the month versus paying for the entire system up front.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
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Standard WBS For Space System Cost Estimating
The NRO cost group provided a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for costing their projects. As quoted from the introduction:
“The standard WBS was developed to capture the costs of any NRO program, whether it is an operational space program, technology demonstration program, ground station upgrade, or a system of systems. It is structured to accommodate varying levels of detail in available data. This allows data to be reported at either lower levels or at higher levels, if lower level data are not available. The wide range of system engineering, integration and test, and program management levels within the WBS is a prime example of how data are reported at many different levels within a program. The standard WBS is designed to allow data reporting at whatever level they are recorded. Because of this versatility, some WBS elements may be repeated, such as the case of a satellite system that operates with two ground stations. For this situation, the costs for each ground station are reported separately via WBS elements 1.3a and 1.3b, and all lower level elements for each ground station will sum up to their respective ground station. The same scheme applies to multiple and dissimilar spacecraft within a program, which will be reported separately as “spacecraft a†and “spacecraft bâ€. Thus, there may be a number of elements in the standard WBS that are irrelevant to any individual program, but are necessary for the database structure to account for a varying level of cost data on disparate legacy programs. If cost data are sparse, they still may be mapped into appropriate higher levels of the WBS”
And as Bryn pointed out: another one from OSD The OSD CAIG also has a mandatory cost and software reporting for specified programs – basically the big ones (DoD 5000-04-M-1, April 18 2007) – with a reference to mandatory WBS structure (Data Item Description DI-MGMT-81334, “Contract Work Breakdown Structure,â€
current version). More info available at http://dcarc.pae.osd.mil
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
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Dealing With Generated Lines of Code
We have gotten several questions recently on how to estimate using lines of code when the lines are generated, that is there is a preprocessor that allows specification of the solution and the code is automatically generated to implement the solution.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
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Software as a Service vs. Service Oriented Architecture vs. Cloud Computing
I have seen a lot of confusion as to the definitions and interrelations between these three technologies. So…
Definitions:
Software as a Service: Software provides an application on-demand. There is no implied language, development methodology, or tool specifically attributed to SaaS. Some development methods may be more appropriate (such as Java and C#)  since SaaS applications often provide the user interface a browser .
Service Oriented Architecture: (SOA) provides methods for systems development and integration where systems group functionality around business processes and package these as interoperable services. A SOA infrastructure allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes. Some organizations offer software as a service running on the organization’s private infrastructure as well.
Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is Internet (cloud) based use of computer technology where dynamically scalable resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure (the Infrastructure as a Service cloud) that supports them...virtualized. Some call this “IT Infrastructure as a Service. â€Â Some venders refer to the “private cloud,†which is essentially virtualized local servers. Gotta love the buzzwords.
SaaS applications may use the cloud but they are not the cloud.
SOA architectures may or may not  be delivered via SaaS but they are not generically SaaS.
Cloud applications may or may not be delivered as SaaS
SEER Estimates All These Technologies
SEER, by virtue of its parameters and knowledge bases, estimates all these categories of computing. But they are not synonyms.
SEER for Software captures the effort, schedule and risk of using a Service Oriented Architecture for development and maintenance.
SEER for Software captures the effort saved by using SaaS rather than software development, while SEER for IT captures the cost or savings of using SaaS rather than organic hardware.
SEER for IT captures the effort, schedule and risk of using / supporting / operating cloud computing versus SaaS computing.
PS This blog is published with a locally installed version of WordPress software. It is not SaaS, not the cloud (running on specific server resources we pay for) and not SOA. A blog could be delivered as SaaS or via the cloud.
PS2: I curse WordPress constantly... full of problems. But if it was SOA it would just share the problems more widely. SOA does not solve software development issues. SOA does potentially provide reuse which can get applications developed faster… By the way, with all the excitement over automatic updates with SaaS, that says you can’t depend on your computer doing today what it did yesterday.
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.
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Thanks To Karen McRitchie, VP Development For 20 Years of Service
I had the privilege today to publically thank Karen McRitchie for 20 years of service with Galorath. Karen, VP of development is sometimes referred to as “the queen of SEER.” All product development, analysis, testing, and other developmental considerations fall under Karen. She has pushed her team to adhere to process while keeping creativity. It was hard to express sufficiently my admiration and gratitude for her both personally and for all the incredible work she does. Members of her team also expressed their admiration for her.
/ppWe reminisced about when she first started. SEER-SEM version 1.31 was shipping. We shipped on 13 diskettes, twelve being a run time version of Windows. The world was into MS-DOS at the time. We spoke of her first week. I showed her a desk, gave her a pile of work, and went on the road for the next 12 weeks. I believe she was employee number 5.
/ppThanks you , Karen./p
Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.