Impact of Dynamicity and Causality on Cost Drivers in Effort Estimation

Software cost estimation is an important step that decides upon the effective manpower, schedule, pricing, profit and success for executing any medium to large sized project. Depending upon the underlying development methodology (e.g., code-centric, model-driven, product-line etc.) and past experience, every enterprise follows some cost estimation strategy that may be derived and customized from a standard cost model (e.g., COCOMO II). However, most software cost estimation techniques that are done at the start of a project do not consider the dynamicity and causality among cost drivers that can alter the accuracy of estimation. In this paper, we investigate those cost drivers that are time and inter-dependent and use system dynamics to simulate their effect in effort estimation.