A Building Blocks Method to Estimate Electronics Size and Calculate Productivity

Uday H. Prabhu

doi:10.4271/2014-01-0227

“Historically and to this day, software has been leading the way in defining metrics, methods and practices towards estimation of size and calculation of productivity. This is mostly due to the inherent need of the software industry to manage large volumes of code and the related large development efforts involved. Relatively, Hardware or Electronics design is a small effort compared to its Software counterparts, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more. There has never been a serious attempt made to create a model for Hardware size estimation and therefore a productivity model\.

This paper describes a novel method of size estimation and quantitative productivity measurement for Electronic Hardware Design. As a first step, the paper explains the purpose of productivity calculation; describes the various methods of software estimation; draws a parallel to the electronic size estimation; justifies productivity measurement needs for Electronic Design and finally describes the unique size estimation method. The process of size estimation, considered as main factor for productivity, is then explained in detail with some real life examples.

Given size is now available, the paper proceeds to analyze the efforts spent in various dimensions of electronic design and provides a means of arriving at effort calculations and thereby productivity numbers given many influencing factors. The above methods are applied across multiple projects and the results are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.

It is expected that the deployment of this method in the industry shall provide a much needed “quantitative assessment” of electronics hardware size and productivity. This will then create a benchmark for companies to assess themselves against one another on equal measurement methods

Standards

SAE Mobilus®

Publications

News

Events

Professional Development

A World in Motion (PreK-12)

Participate with SAE

SAE Membership

Donate

A Building Blocks Method to Estimate Electronics Size and Calculate Productivity 2014-01-0227

SAE MOBILUS