Project Proposal:  SIMPLE web site

1. Name and address of sponsoring organization:

Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213

2.   Name, address, phone number, and email address of a technical liaison

Paul C. Clements
clements@sei.cmu.edu

3.  Project description

The SEI has developed the Structured Intuitive Model for Product Line Economics (SIMPLE) [http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/economics_spl.html ].  SIMPLE lets software product line managers construct formulas that express the costs and benefits of various product strategies, compare them, and thus choose the best one.   Examples of questions SIMPLE is designed to help answer include:

• Should I merge a set of products into a single software product line or let them continue to be managed and maintained independently?
• I want to produce a new product.  To which of my existing product lines would it best to add that product?
• How much will it cost to take my product line through three periodic maintenance cycles?

To help people use SIMPLE, and the SEI has developed a web site [https://simple.sei.cmu.edu/ ].  Users can come to the web site, choose from among a set of pre-formulated scenarios, fill in parameter values (such as the cost of building a product), and the web site will calculate the value of the SIMPLE formula.

The current web site is merely a first-stage prototype.  There are many, many enhancements that need to be made, and these enhancements constitute the project.  They include:

• Adding more scenarios, and the corresponding formulas
• Finding a better look and feel for entering data – many formulas require the user to enter a large number of input parameters
• Adding the capability to let a user define a new scenario and the new corresponding formula
• Letting the user enter a range of values, to handle uncertainty.  SIMPLE would then return a range of results, corresponding to the possibilities.
• Adding Monte Carlo simulation capabilities to handle uncertainty.  A user would enter a range of values, give a probability profile, and SIMPLE would run a large number of Monte Carlo-based simulations in order to give the most likely answer.
• We want to let a user be able to log in and enter a sophisticated “profile” that includes default answers to questions that would otherwise distribute over all of the scenarios – e.g., what is your labor cost?  How many products do you have in your product line?  Etc.
• We want to add data mining to the product line – with a user’s permission, we want to “peek” at their data to find out how people are using SIMPLE.
• We want to let a user save a session and resume it later.
• We want to add some sort of user forum to the web site, where users can discuss problems, share solutions, ask questions, etc.
• We want to collect usage data.

4. Additional comments, restrictions, or special instructions:

This project will include a great deal of remote interaction.  The student should be comfortable with that, and be especially effective and proactive at communicating ideas and information clearly in succinct e-mail messages.  The requirements for the project are not firm, and so there will be a substantial amount of prototyping, feedback, and re-work.