Design & Analysis of Cost Estimation for New Mobile-COCOMO Tool for Mobile Application

Abstract

Software cost estimation is a resource forecasting method, which is required by the software development process. However, estimating the workload, schedule and cost of a software project is a complex task because it involves predicting the future using historical project data and extrapolating to see future values. For cost estimates for software projects, several methods are used. Among the various software cost estimation methods available, the most commonly used technology is the COCOMO method. Similarly, to calculate software costs, there are several cost estimating tools available for software developers to use. But these released cost estimation tools can only provide parameters (i.e. cost, development time, average personnel) for large software with multiple lines of code. However, if a software developer wants to estimate the cost of a small project that is usually a mobile application, the available tools will not give the right results. Therefore, to calculate the cost of the mobile application, the available cost estimation method COCOMO II is improved to a new model called New Mobile COCOMO Tool. The New Mobile COCOMO tool developed specifically for mobile applications is a boon for software developers working in small software applications because it only includes important multipliers that play a vital role in estimating the cost of developing mobile applications. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to propose a cost estimation model with a special case of COCOMO II, especially for mobile applications, which calculates the person-month, the programmed time and the average personnel involved in the development of any mobile app.