measure of product line
... • a prorated share of the asset development costs The product development group’s costs should be actual expenditures captured by the effort tracking system. If significant costs are incurred to purchase commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS) components, these too should be included with the product development expenditures. Various schemes [DISA 95, Gaffney & Durek 89, Poulin 97] have been proposed for prorating the asset development costs to a specific product development project/product. For our purposes here, we propose a simple formulation of = ost AllocatedC ts ent Projec t Developm New Produc Number of ment Costs et Develop Annual Ass for determining the amount of core asset cost to be allocated to product development projects. Annual Asset Development Costs could initially be based on the budget for an asset development group if the actual expenditures are not available. This metric could be tracked on a quarterly basis depending upon the rate of new product releases. In this case, costs associated with actual core asset and product development projects completed during the quarter would be tracked. Note that there will necessarily be a gap ...