23.8. A software manager is in charge of the development of a safety-critical software system, which is designed to control a radiotherapy machine to treat patients suffering from cancer. This system is embedded in the machine and must run on a special-purpose processor with a fixed amount of memory (256 Mbytes). The machine communicates with a patient database system to obtain the details of the patient and, after treatment, automatically records the radiation dose delivered and other treatment details in the database.

The COCOMO method is used to estimate the effort required to develop this system and an estimate of 26 person-months is computed. All cost driver multipliers were set to 1 when making this estimate.

Explain why this estimate should be adjusted to take project, personnel, product, and organizational factors into account. Suggest four factors that might have significant effects on the initial COCOMO estimate and propose possible values for these factors. Justify why you have included each factor.