Establishing the Optimal Software Cost Equation Using Cost Affecting Factors and Elitist Gene Expression Programming

Accurate estimation of software’s cost isone of the most intricate activity during the software development lifecycle.There are many factors that directly or indirectly affect the development cost of any software and these factors range from the size of the software to the experience of project manager. Calculating and interpreting these factors would be much valuable in software cost estimation if an ideal relationship between cost and these factors is found out. In this paper we have tried to identify some of the critical factors that affect the cost and we have also attempted to create a software cost equation that institutes the relationship between these factors and the software cost, using Gene Expression Programming.Our aim is to create an optimized model for cost estimation that includes least number of most acute factors for more accurate predictions. To settle this relationship, we have used Gene Expression Programming, a variant of Genetic Programming, because of its proven potential in evolving mathematical equations.