Choosing a software cost estimation model for your organization: A case study

In the last decade or so, many software cost estimation models have been developed. These differ substantially from each other, particularly with respect to the inputs required and their outputs. For a software manager, the problem of selecting a particular model, of a combination of models that can be applied to an individual organization, is not at all trivial. This paper describes the efforts that were made to solve this problem for two organizations who had collected data on past development efforts. Statistical correlations between the actual and the estimated efforts calculated by using different cost estimation models were obtained. Regression analysis revealed that the cost model that is used by the organizations is not ideal for their environment. Statistical tests show that the results obtained are indeed statistically significant. The methodology used to perform the case study is applied to predict the development effort for a project, and the result is quite impressive.