Industry practices in project management for multimedia information systems

This paper describes ongoing research directed at formulating a set of appropriate measures for assessing and ultimately predicting effort requirements for multimedia systems development. Whilst significant advances have been made in the determination of measures for both transaction-based and process-intensive systems, very little work has been undertaken in relation to measures for multimedia systems. A small preliminary empirical study is reviewed as a precursor to a more exploratory investigation of the factors that are considered by industry to be influential in determining development effort. This work incorporates the development and use of a goal-based framework to assist the measure selection process from a literature basis, followed by an industry questionnaire. The results provide a number of preliminary but nevertheless useful insights into contemporary project management practices with respect to multimedia systems.Unpublished1. B. Boehm, Software Engineering Economics, Prentice Hall, 1981. 2. A. J. Albrecht and J. E. Gaffney Jr, “Software function, source lines of code, and development effort prediction: a software science validation”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 9(6) (1983) 639-648. 3. E. England and A. Finney, Managing Multimedia, Addison-Wesley, 1996. 4. I. M. Marshall, W. B. Samson. and P. I. Dugard, “A proposed framework for predicting the development effort of multimedia courseware”, in Multimedia/Hypermedia in Open Distributed Environments, Eds. F. Kappe and W. Herzner, Springer-Verlag, 1994, pp. 161-180. 5. X. Gao and B. Lo, “A modified function point method for CAL systems with respect to software cost estimation”, Proceedings of the Software Engineering Conference SE:E&P'96, 1996, pp. 125-132. 6. M. D. Merrill, Z. Li and M. K. Jones, “Limitations of first generation instructional design”, Educational Technology 30(1) (1991) 7-11. 7. P. Beautement, “Review of interactive video systems and their possible application to training in the 90's”, Interactive Learning International 7 (1991) 45-54. 8. I. M. Marshall, W. B. Samson, P. I. Dugard and G. R. Lund, “The mythical courseware development to delivery time ratio”, Computers in Education 25(3) (1995) 113-122. 9. C. Fraser, The Production Assistant’s Survival Guide, BBC Television Training, 1994. 10. R. Bretz, Handbook for Producing Educational and Public-Access Programs for Cable Television, Rand Corporation, 1976. 11. T. Fletcher, S. G. MacDonell and W. B. L. Wong, “Early experiences in measuring multimedia systems development effort”, in Multimedia Technology and Applications (Proc. ICMTM '96), Ed. V. W. S. Chow, Springer, 1997, pp. 211-220. 12. V. R. Basili and H. D. Rombach, “The TAME Project: towards improvement-oriented software environments”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 14(6) (1988) 758-773