A meta-model for software development resource expenditures

One of the basic goals of software engineering is the establishment of useful models and equations to predict the cost of any given programming project. Many models have been proposed over the last several years, but, because of differences in the data collected, types of projects and environmental factors among software development sites, these models are not transportable and are only valid within the organization where they were developed. This result seems reasonable when one considers that a model developed at a certain environment will only be able to capture the impact of the factors which have a variable effect within that environment. Those factors which are constant at that environment, and therefore do not cause variations in the productivity among projects produced there, may have different or variable effects at another environment.This paper presents a model-generation process which permits the development of a resource estimation model for any particular organization. The model is based on data collected by that organization which captures its particular environmental factors and the differences among its particular projects. The process provides the capability of producing a model tailored to the organization which can be expected to be more effective than any model originally developed for another environment. It is demonstrated here using data collected from the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.