Pharmaceutical Industry Overview

The PRICE-S model was originally developed at RCA for use internally on software projects such as some that were part of the Apollo moon program. It was then released in 1977 as a proprietary model and used for estimating several US DoD, NASA and other government software projects. The model equations were not released in the public domain, although a few of the model’s central algorithms were published in. The tool continued to become popular and is now marketed by PRICE Systems, which is a privately held company formerly affiliated with Lockheed Martin. As published on PRICE Systems website (http://www.pricesystems.com), the PRICE-S Model consists of three submodels that enable estimating costs and schedules for the development and support of computer systems. These three submodels and their functionalities are outlined below:

The Acquisition Submodel: This submodel forecasts software costs and schedules. The model covers all types of software development, including business systems, communications, command and control, avionics, and space systems. PRICE-S addresses current software issues such as reengineering, code generation, spiral development, rapid development, rapid prototyping, object-oriented development, and software productivity measurement.

The Sizing Submodel: This submodel facilitates estimating the size of the software to be developed. Sizing can be in SLOC, Function Points and/or Predictive Object Points (POPs). POPs is a new way of sizing object oriented development projects and was introduced in based on previous work one in Object Oriented (OO) metrics done by Chidamber et al. and others.

The Life-cycle Cost Submodel: This submodel is used for rapid and early costing of the maintenance and support phase for the software. It is used in conjunction with the Acquisition Submodel, which provides the development costs and design parameters.

PRICE Systems continues to update their model to meet new challenges. Recently, they have added Foresight 2.0, the newest version of their software solution for forecasting time, effort and costs for commercial and non-military government software projects.