Cost Estimation Software cost estimation is the process of predicting the effort required to develop a software system. Accurate estimates are important to both developers and customers. They can be used for generating request for proposals, contract negotiations, scheduling, monitoring and control. Underestimating the costs may result in management approving proposed systems that then exce ed their budgets, with underdeveloped functions and poor quality, and failure t o complete on time. Overestimating may result in too many resources committed to the project or failing to win the contract, which can lead t o loss of jobs. There are three parameters involved in calculating the total cost of a software development project: -Hardware and software costs including maintenance, -Travel and training costs, -Effort costs. Calculating software productivity is very important in estimating software cost. Productivity estimates are normally based on measuring attributes of the software and dividing this by the total effort required for development (Somerville, 2008). The two types of metric used are size-related metrics andfunction-related metrics . Lines of source code per programmer-month (LOC/pm) is a widely used software productivity metric. To calculate LOC/pm, count the total number of lines of source c ode that are delivered, then divide the count by the total time in programmer-months required to complete the project. Total time includes time spent on requirements, design, coding, testing and documentation. Comparing productivity with different programming languages can give misleading impressions of programmer productivity. If one language requires more lines than another to implement the same functionality, productivity estimates will be anomalous. Alternative to using code size is to use some measure of the functionality of the code. Functionality is independent of implementation language. A function point is calculated by
