COCHCOMO: An extension of COCOMO II for Estimating Effort for Requirement Changes during Software Development Phase

Software undergoes changes at all stages of the software development process. Accepting too many changes will cause expense and delay and rejecting the changes may cause customer dissatisfaction. One of the inputs that help the software project management to decide whether to accept or reject the changes is by having a reliable estimation of the change effort. From a software development perspective, the estimation has to take into account the inconsistent states of software artifacts across project lifecycle i.e., fully developed or partially developed. This inconsistent state requires different ways of estimation such as the fully developed artifacts may have different calculation compared to the partially developed artifacts. Many change effort estimation models have been developed and one of them is using impact analysis. One main challenge of this technique from software development perspective is that this technique is specifically used for software maintenance phase in which all software artifacts have been completely developed. This research introduces a new change effort estimation model that is able to use different estimation techniques for different states of software artifacts. The outcome of this research is a new change effort estimation model for software development phase using the extended version of the static and dynamic analysis techniques from our previous works. The significant achievements of the approach are demonstrated through an extensive experimental validation using several case scenarios. Key-Words: Software development, change impact analysis, change effort estimation, impact analysis, effort estimation