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The estimation of the software cost remains one of the most challenging problems in software engineering; as a preliminary estimate of cost includes many elements of uncertainty. Reliable and early estimates are difficult to obtain because of the lack of the detailed information about the future system at an early stage. However, the early estimates are really important when bidding for a contract or determining whether a project is feasible in terms of cost-benefit analysis. Estimators often rely on their past experiences for the prediction of effort for software projects. The fundamental factors that are contributing towards inaccuracy of the cost estimation process are imprecise and drifting requirements, information not readily available on past projects, and the methods that were developed and trained on specific data. In this thesis, we have developed a software cost estimation tool that helps commercial software-development organizations to effectively and quantitatively measure and analyze the software metrics based upon the functional requirements, operational constraints and organization’s capability to handle a project. This cost estimation tool is a fusion implementation or an essence of certain software measurement and estimation techniques that help a software organization to evaluate and analyze fundamental software metrics such as complexity, time, effort, and cost all of which are essential to improving turnaround time and attaining organizational maturity. The new cost estimation method is proposed for the iterative software development projects. The use case technique is implemented per iteration for the specification of the software requirements. COCOMO II and Function Point were used to compute the effort required for successive iterations. We also computed the magnitude of relative error for successive iterations. We tested the proposed method on student projects in order to illustrate its usefulness.

Software maintenance is an important activity in software engineering. Over the decades, software maintenance costs have been continually reported to account for a large majority of software costs [Zelkowitz 1979, Boehm 1981, McKee 1984, Boehm 1988, Erlikh 2000]. This fact is not surprising. On the one hand, software environments and requirements are constantly changing, which lead to new software system upgrades to keep pace with the changes. On the other hand, the economic benefits of software reuse have encouraged the software industry to reuse and enhance the existing systems rather than to build new ones [Boehm 1981, 1999]. Thus, it is crucial for project managers to estimate and manage the software maintenance costs effectively. / Accurate cost estimation of software projects is one of the most desired capabilities in software development Process. Accurate cost estimates not only help the customer make successful investments but also assist the software project manager in coming up with appropriate plans for the project and making reasonable decisions during the project execution. Although there have been reports that software maintenance accounts for the majority of the software total cost, the software estimation research has focused considerably on new development and much less on maintenance. Now if we talk about real time software system(RTSS) development cost estimation and maintenance cost estimation is not much differ from simple software but some critical factor are considered for RTSS development and maintenance like response time of software for input and processing time to give correct output. As like simple software maintenance cost estimation existing models (i.e. Modified COCOMO-II) can be used but after inclusion of some critical parameters related to RTSS. A Hypothetical Expert input and an industry data set of eighty completed software maintenance projects were used to build the model for RTSS maintenance cost. The full model, which was derived through the Bayesian analysis, yields effort estimates within 30% of the actual 51% of the time,outperforming the original COCOMO II model when it was used to estimate theseprojects by 34%. Further performance improvement was obtained when calibrating the full model to each individual program, generating effort estimates within 30% of the actual 80% of the time.

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Allant des simples pages Web aux systèmes transactionnels sophistiqués, les applications Web ont beaucoup évolué et continuent de l'être. On parle même d'une nouvelle ingénierie logicielle à savoir l'ingénierie Web [pressman2005]. La mise en marché rapide et l'hétérogénéité de l'équipe de développement sont parmi les principales spécificités des applications et projets Web. Ces spécificités lancent de nouveaux défis aux modèles d'estimation actuels même pour les plus matures d'entre eux comme COCOMO II. Dans ce travail nous avons analysé la fiabilité d'un nouveau modèle d'estimation à savoir: WebMo. Ce dernier est une adaptation de la version COCOMO II avant projet au contexte du Web. L'instigateur de WebMo est Donald Reifer qui est aussi un membre très actif dans la communauté de COCOMO. Reifer a présenté son nouveau modèle comme une alternative viable à COCOMO II si on le dote en plus d'une nouvelle métrique qui tient compte des spécificités des applications Web. Dans cette étude visant l'analyse de fiabilité de WebMo, nous avons développé un outil d'estimation qui permet d'estimer et comparer les efforts de développement pour des projets Web selon les modèles COCOMO II et WebMo. En suivant un processus de sélection de projet bien défini, nous avons choisi cinq projets Web de la banque de projets ISBSG. Malgré l'immaturité du modèle WebMo et son caractère prévisionnel, les résultats générés par l'outil étaient conformes à nos attentes. En effet, WebMo fournit des estimations de l'effort plus proches de la réalité en comparaison avec son modèle de base (COCOMO II version avant projet). Ceci est dû essentiellement à la prise en compte des objets multimédias et autres objets spécifiques aux applications Web par la nouvelle métrique de Reifer à savoir: les 'Web Objects'. Un autre facteur important de succès est la calibration du modèle qui est basée uniquement sur des projets Web. Finalement, on suggère certaines recommandations telles qu'une version WebMo post-architecture pour des phases plus avancées du cycle de développement et aussi tenir compte de la diversité des langages de programmation, caractéristique typique des applications Web. Nous recommandons aussi d'alimenter la base de données du modèle avec plus de projets pour une meilleure calibration et ramener sa conception à une forme plus standard comme celle de COCOMO II. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Estimation, Projet Web, WebMo, COCOMO II, ISBSG, Ingénierie Web.

Effective software cost estimation is one of the most challenging and important activities in software development. The software industry does not estimate projects well. Poor estimation leads to poor project planning with resulting schedule overruns, inadequate staffing, low system quality, and many aborted projects. Research on software estimation is needed to build more accurate models of the key aspects of software development. The goals of research in this dissertation are to investigate and improve the modeling of team size and project structures in current software estimation methods.Mathematical models for estimating the impacts of project team size and three variations of project structure are developed. These models accept the outputs of the COCOMO II software estimation tool, allow variation in both team size and project structure, and produce more detailed project estimates. This new extended model of COCOMO II is implemented in a decision support tool f or software estimators called PSEstimate.Following the design science research paradigm, the artifact is evaluated with an experiment with experienced software project managers. Three treatment groups: a manual (no tool) group, a COCOMO II group, and a PSEstimate group, completed two multipart software cost estimation tasks. The accuracy and consistency of the cost and schedule estimates, the participants' confidence in their estimates, and their satisfaction with and perceived usefulness of the cost estimation tool are measured.The experimental results support most of the hypotheses of the dissertation. For most tasks, individuals aided by computer-based decision support tools produce more accurate project effort estimates and are more confident in their estimates than manual estimators. There are no significant differences between the three groups on schedule estimation. A possible explanation is that experienced estimators in the manual group compensate for the inaccuracy of th eir effort estimates by adding time to their schedule estimates.The research contributions are new mathematical models for software estimation based on project team size and structure; a decision support tool (PSEstimate) that incorporates these models; and the experimental results that demonstrate improvements in software estimation by experienced project managers when the new models and tool are applied in practice.

Google Analytics is the most widely used web traffic analytics program in the world with a wide array of functionality which serve several different purposes for its users. However the cost of training employees in the usage of Google Analytics can be expensive and time consuming due to the generality of the software. The purpose of this thesis is to explore an alternative solution to hav- ing employees learn the default Google Analytics interface and thus possibly re- ducing training expenses. A prototype written in the Java programming lan- guage is developed which implements the MVC and facade software patterns for the purpose of making the development process more efficient. It contains a feature for retrieving custom reports from Google Analytics using Google’s Core Reporting API in addition to two web pages are integrated into the proto- type using the Google Embed API. In the result the prototype is used along with the software estimation method COCOMO to make an estimation of the amount of effort required to develop a similar program. This is done by counting the prototype’s source lines of code manually, following the guidelines given by the COCOMO manual, and then implementing the result in the COCOMO estima- tion formula. The count of lines of code for the entire prototype is 567 and the count which considers reused code is 466. The value retrieved from the formula is 1.61±0.14 person months for the estimation of the entire program and 1.31± 0.16 for a program with reused code. The conclusion of the thesis is that the res- ult from the estimation has several weaknesses and further research is necessary in order to improve the accuracy of the result.

This thesis presents the work based on the software cost estimation model COCOMO II, which was applied to a case study object derived from a software organization that had a completed project at its disposal. One of the most difficult phases in software development is the planning process and the ability to provide accurate cost estimations for a project. A competitive market calls for delicate and strategic excellence in management issues such as project plans. While software estimations may by straightforward in perception it is intricate in actuality. COCOMO II is allegedly one of the top contenders for the number one tool to utilize in software cost estimations, based on available literature, and it is an important ingredient for managing software lines of business. The original model was initially published by Dr. Barry Boehm in 1981, but as the software field moved rapidly into newfangled processes and techniques, the need to cope with this evolutionary change resulted in a revised and novel edition of the model. The industry project subjected to this case study acts as a source of data for the model to use as input parameters, and this procedure is systematically explicated in a data collection exposition. Validation and application of parameters as well as the model is later on applied as a foundation for subsequent discussions. Characteristics such as calibration and prediction accuracy in the estimation model are moreover scrutinized in order to base farther conclusions on.

With the increase of iOS applications on the market the demand and use of Backend as a Service (BaaS) providers also increase. In an early phase of the development it is beneficial for a potential application publisher to use a BaaS to quickly reach the market. Over time the provided services may be inadequate which make many BaaS users migrate to a custom developed backend. This paper intends to investigate which BaaS provider gives the least dismissed effort when making a transition to a custom developed backend with the purpose of providing basis for potential application publishers in the selection of a provider, given that a future transition to a custom backend will occur. From a population of ten providers, five were randomly selected – Firebase, Kinvey, CloudMine, Kumulos and Kii. In order to measure required effort for each provider, code that is tightly coupled to each provider’s SDK was implemented, according to provider guidelines and documentation. The implementations were measured with the COCOMO II model which gives a result in terms of required person months (PM). The measured PM of each implementation was compared. The hypothesis of the study could be rejected if the resulting PM of two implementations were disjointed. The result and analysis show difference in PM which lead to a rejection of the hypothesis. Whether the assumptions of the organization, product and project affected the results were analysed and the hypothesis was rejected regardless of these assumptions. If the organization of a potential application publisher resembles the one in the research Firebase is the recommended choice of BaaS provider.

This diploma thesis deals with cost estimation issue and design of software application assisting while creating such estimates. This application should provide an alternative to other approaches of information system cost estimates. In the theoretical part we acquire an overview of existing methods of estimate creations and the possibilities of their use. The practical part contains a design of an application assisting estimations. The correctness of the proposed design is verified by partial implementation of the application later on in the last part of the thesis.