Barry Boehm:* - “The more members that are added to a team, the more . . . time is consumed in communication with other team members . . .” - “This decrease in [programmer] productivity on larger projects is called a diseconomy of scale in economic terms.” Methods with different impacts on productivity/cost will have a relatively greater impact as program size increases * Source: Software Engineering Economics, Barry Boehm, Prentice-Hall (COCOMO model)

From the Script: SLIDE 28 - Diseconomy of Scale

Barry Boehm, in his book Software Engineering Economics, defines diseconomy of scale as a decrease in productivity based on the increasing size of a project and an increasing number of project team members (programmers).

In Boehm's words: "The more members that are added to a team, the more time is consumed in communication with other team members. This decrease in programmer productivity is called a diseconomy of scale in economic terms"

He concludes that methods that have an impact on productivity and cost will have a proportionately greater impact as the size of a program increases. Productivity improvements generated by a method (or language), which may be minor in a small, simple program, become compelling as program size and complexity grow.

The implications of this slide are: (a) that different techniques are needed for bigger systems and (b) that it is important to be able to have a cost savings technique that scales up.