( This page is part of the NOVA system. )

What is NOVA?

NOVA is a code library for LISP programmers building decision support tools for software project managers.

NOVA supports a set of USC COCOMO-family models. These models offer predictions for:

• How long it will take to build a software; measured in elapsed months;
• How many months of effort are required during those elapsed months (so your team size is effort/months);
• How many defects will be introduced or removed from your software;
• Number of projects threats; i.e how prone is your software to schedule overruns due to poor management decisions.

In standard practice, these models are tuned to local conditions using historical data. NOVA is an experiment in an alternate approach. When historical data is absent, NOVA uses AI search methods to find policies that are useful across the space of possible tunings.

NOVA is licensed under GPLv3.0. Share and enjoy.

NOVA was written by the LISP gang at West Virginia University's CSEE department, from a code base initialized by Tim Menzies (http://menzies.us).

The NOVA code base

This code contains:

Apps

Your application code that uses the following.

Boot

Functions to boot the rest of the system.

Tricks

Some general LISP tricks.

Guess

Some tools for extracting and caching values from a space of options.

XOMO

A set of University of Southern California's COCOMO-family software process models ported to LISP.

Misc

Other stuff

Getting started

Install Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) from the SBCL web site or as an ECLIPSE plug-in.

Download NOVA's lisp code. To see what versions are available, browse http://unbox.org/wisp/tags/nova To obtain version "X", download http://unbox.org/wisp/tags/nova/X/nova-X.zip into a clean directory.

In a clean directory

unzip nova-X.zip
cd nova/lisp

Start SBCL and try

      
CL-USER> (load "make.lisp")

This should produce something that looks like this:

--------------------------------------------------
Welcome to NOVA v0.1
Copyright (C) 2008 Tim Menzies tim@menzies.us 

This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY- 
for details type (copyright). This is free software, 
and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type (copyright),
--------------------------------------------------