OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE DOCUMENTS a tendency toward cost and effort overruns in software projects. On average, this overrun seems to be around 30 percent.1 Furthermore, comparing the estimation accuracy of the 1980s with that reported in more recent surveys suggests that the estimation accuracy hasn’t changed much since then. (The only analyses that suggest a strong improvement in estimation accu...

Software cost estimation is the process of predicting the effort required to develop a software system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last 30 years. This paper provides a general overview of software cost estimation methods including the recent advances in the field. As a number of these models rely on a software size estimate as input, we first provide an overview of commo...

in this paper an efficient three- stage algorithm is developed for software production cost and time estimation. first stage includes a hybrid model composed of cocomo and function points methods to increase estimation accuracy. second stage encompasses paired comparisons matrix of analytical hierarchy process to determine amount of any resources consumed in each step of software production by ...