Cone of Uncertainty - History of The Cone of Uncertainty

History of The Cone of Uncertainty

The original conceptual basis of the Cone of Uncertainty was developed for engineering and construction in the chemical industry by the founders of the American Association of Cost Engineers (now AACE International). They published a proposed standard estimate type classification system with uncertainty ranges in 1958 (Gorey 1958) and presented "cone" illustrations in the industry literature at that time (Bauman, 1958). In the software field, the concept was picked up by Barry Boehm (Boehm 1981, p. 311). Boehm referred to the concept as the "Funnel Curve" (Stutzke 2005, p. 10). Boehm's initial quantification of the effects of the Funnel Curve were subjective (Boehm 1981, p. 311). Later work by Boehm and his colleagues at USC applied data from a set of software projects from the U.S. Air Force and other sources to validate the model. The basic model was further validated based on work at NASA's Software Engineering Lab (NASA 1990).

The first time the name "Cone of Uncertainty" was used to describe this concept was in Software Project Survival Guide (McConnell 1997).