In most software development organizations, there is seldom a one-to-one mapping between software developers and development tasks. It is frequently necessary to concurrently assign individuals to multiple tasks, and to assign more than one individual to work cooperatively on a single task. A principal goal in making such assignments should be to minimize the effort required to complete each task. But what impact does the manner in which developers are assigned to tasks have on the effort requirements? This paper identifies four task assignment factors: team size, concurrency, intensity and fragmentation. These four factors are shown to improve the predictive ability of the well-known Intermediate COCOMO cost estimation model. A parsimonious effort estimation model is also derived that utilizes a subset of the task assignment factors and Unadjusted Function Points. For the data examined, this parsimonious model is shown to have goodness of fit and quality of estimation superior to that of the COCOMO model, while utilizing fewer cost factors.

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Analyses of geomorphic, soil, and topographic data from the northern Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, confirm that the buried Chicxulub impact crater has a distinct surface expression and that carbonate sedimentation throughout the Cenozoic has been influenced by the crater. Late Tertiary sedimentation was mostly restricted to the region within the buried crater, and a semicircular moat existed until at least Pliocene time. The topographic expression of the crater is a series of features concentric with the crater. The most prominent is an approximately 83-km-radius trough or moat containing sinkholes (the Cenote ring). Early Tertiary surfaces rise abruptly outside the moat and form a stepped topography with an outer trough and ridge crest at radii of approximately 103 and approximately 129 km, respectively. Two discontinuous troughs lie within the moat at radii of approximately 41 and approximately 62 km. The low ridge between the inner troughs corresponds to the buried peak ring. The moat corresponds to the outer edge of the crater floor demarcated by a major ring fault. The outer trough and the approximately 62-km-radius inner trough also mark buried ring faults. The ridge crest corresponds to the topographic rim of the crater as modified by postimpact processes. These interpretations support previous findings that the principal impact basin has a diameter of approximately 180 km, but concentric, low-relief slumping extends well beyond this diameter and the eroded crater rim may extend to a diameter of approximately 260 km.

Researchers have often commented on the high correlation between McCabe’s Cyclomatic Complexity (CC) and lines of code (LOC). Many have believed this correlation high enough to justify adjusting CC by LOC or even substituting LOC for CC. However, from an empirical standpoint the relationship of CC to LOC is still an open one. We undertake the largest statistical study of this relationship to date. Employing modern regression techniques, we find the linearity of this relationship has been severely underestimated, so much so that CC can be said to have absolutely no explana-tory power of its own. This research presents evidence that LOC and CC have a stable practically perfect linear rela-tionship that holds across programmers, languages, code paradigms (procedural versus object-oriented), and software processes. Linear models are developed relating LOC and CC. These models are verified against over 1.2 million randomly selected source files from the SourceForge code repository. These files represent software projects from three target languages (C, C++, and Java) and a variety of programmer experience levels, software architectures, and de-velopment methodologies. The models developed are found to successfully predict roughly 90% of CC’s variance by LOC alone. This suggest not only that the linear relationship between LOC and CC is stable, but the aspects of code complexity that CC measures, such as the size of the test case space, grow linearly with source code size across lan-guages and programming paradigms