A new approach to effort estimation of software projects

The development of the software industry has gained a high momentum in parallel with the development of technology and the economy in recent years. Even small and medium-sized firms have to use software to carry out their works and to compete in the industry. Since their needs are very different, large-scale firms and public institutions needs for custom software development much more. To meet this need serious budgets are reserved. Calculating the cost of software is very important for determination of the budget. Software development costs are constantly increasing. Software cost estimation is a very important problem for organizations and governments. Numerous projects exceed their planned time and budgets. The main cause of this problem is inaccurate estimation of time and budgets. Software development costs often go out of control due to various deficiencies in measurement and estimation methodologies. In this regard especially in the last 15 years, numerous studies have been made. The majority of these studies are more experimental methods and not practically applicable. Satisfactory results have not been achieved yet. In order to alleviate the problems stated above, this study proposes a new estimation model for form based applications which are heavily used in industry. The proposed estimation model is based on the most widely used model COCOMO II.2000. In this model, taking into consideration of complexities of objects, estimations can be made by making use of a conversion table utilizing number of code lines or objects. In this way, a practical and realistic method is constructed. The method is applied to a specific project group and satisfactory results are obtained. Keywords: Software Development Effort estimation, Software Development Cost estimation, COCOMO II, Form Based Applications