Integrating System Modeling and Cost Models Using Meta-Modeling Techniques

The precise estimation of time and resource consumption plays a pivotal role in planning software development projects at their earliest development phase. Since cost parameters are mostly determined by the architecture, a possible approach is to design a platform independent architectural model of the prospective software and estimate the cost based on it. In this paper, we introduce a method, which produces a cost estimate by processing the architectural model of the software being designed. The provided method analyzes the architectural models, and utilizes a modified version of Function Point Analysis to determine the probable cost based on the analysis. The paper also presents a preliminary verification process to evaluate the accuracy of the cost estimation method. The main achievement of the introduced method is that it estimates cost in platform independent units, which can be refined to give accurate cost estimation for different platform implementations.