A giant leap forward

Nesma president Ton Dekkers and ICEAA president Brian Glauser have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will enable Nesma and ICEAA to cooperate on the development of a ‘Software Cost Engineering’ curriculum and certification program. This is a giant leap for Nesma, ICEAA and the software industry in general!

Software Cost Engineering is important

Nowadays, accurate estimation of software projects is important, very important, sometimes even extremely important! Although the news sometimes seems to be dominated by projects that went completely wrong, there are companies out there that have adopted processes, procedures and methods that enable them to estimate their software projects quite accurately, delivering the project pretty close to the estimated cost.

Bundled expertise

Nesma and ICEAA wish to bundle all the best practices in the industry in a ‘Software Cost Engineering Body of Knowledge’ with the idea to develop a specific curriculum for cost engineers and a certification program for Software Cost Engineer. ICEAA already has a curriculum and a certification program in place and software estimation is part of this program. However, the software component of this certification is very small, and quite targeted to using source lines of code in combination with the COCOMO II model, which is quite popular in mainly the government in the USA. Both ICEAA and Nesma have come to the conclusion that the software industry needs a separate Software Cost Engineering certification in which the general cost estimating techniques are targeted to the software industry.

The next weeks a plan of action will be drawn up and the task force that is going to establish this curriculum and certification is going to be composed.

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