Empirical Investigation About the Factors Affecting the Cost Estimation in Global Software Development Context

Abstract

Software organization always aims at developing a quality software product using the estimated development resources, effort, and time. Global Software Development (GSD) has emerged as an essential tool to ensure optimal utilization of resources, which is performed in globally distributed settings in various geographical locations. Global software engineering focuses on reducing the cost, increasing the development speed, and accessing skilled developers worldwide. Estimating the required amount of resources and effort in the distributed development environment remains a challenging task. Thus, there is a need to focus on cost estimation models in the GSD context. We nevertheless acknowledge that several cost estimation techniques have been reported. However, to the best of our knowledge, the existing cost estimation techniques/models lack considering the additional cost drivers required to compute the accurate cost estimation in the GSD context. Motivated by this, the current work aims at identifying the other cost drivers that affect the cost estimation in the context of GSD. To achieve the targeted objectives, current state-of-the-art related to existing cost estimation techniques of GSD is reported. We adopted SLR and Empirical approach to address the formulated research questions. The current study also identifies the missing factors that would help the practitioners improve the cost estimation models. The results indicate that previously conducted work ignores the additional elements necessary for the cost estimation in the GSD context. Moreover, the current work proposes a conceptual cost estimation model tailored to fit the GSD context.