Estimating Direct Return on Investment of Independent Verification and Validation using COCOMO-II

J.B. Dabney, G. Barber, and D. Ohi (USA)

Keywords

Verification and validation, return on investment, defect leakage, cost modeling.

Abstract

We define direct return on investment (ROI) as the ratio of reduction in development cost arising from early issue detection by independent verification and validation (IV&V) to the cost of IV&V. This paper describes a methodology to compute direct ROI for projects that don’t maintain detailed cost-to-fix records. The method is used in a case study in which IV&V was applied to a mission-critical NASA software project. For this project, direct IV&V ROI was 11.8, demonstrating that IV&V was cost effective.

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