Safety Critical Software Effort Estimation using COCOMO II: A Case Study in Aeronautical Industry

Abstract

This paper provides a case study of a real aeronautical safety-critical software development project under the DO-178C process, where the COCOMO II method was applied as an estimation technique for the required software development effort. The main goal and contribution of the case study is to support the research on software effort estimation and provide software practitioners with useful data based on a real project. We collected the actual required effort for the project and then compared to the estimated values. The rationales for each scale factor and effort multiplier selection were also described in details. We found a Magnitude of Relative Error (MRE) of 31% and provided alternatives for future work in order to increase the effort estimation accuracy in safety critical software projects.