MaCO: A Tool For Aiding Management Of Cost Overrun Of A Software Development Project

„Cost Overrun‟ is one of the major factors for the failure of a software development project. The major reason for this difficulty is poor analysis and management of risk factors. This paper aims to find out the ways to manage and predict the overrun in this cost by using Influence Diagram (ID). Two major risk factors having adverse impact on the cost are decided to be: (1) creeping user requirements (2) use of unnecessary features in the project. An integration of impacts of these factors with experts‟ opinion and with the existing databases (consisting of probability of occurrence of risk factors) helped us to create an ID based system that is capable to model the cost overrun. This system can be used by the software manager at any stage during software development..