COCHCOMO: A Change Effort Estimation Tool for Software Development Phase

It is important for software project manager to make effective decisions when managing software changes during software development. One type of information that helps to make the decision is the estimation of the change effort produced by the changes. One of the inputs that help to decide whether to accept or reject the changes is by having reliable estimation on the change effort. From software development perspective, the estimation has to take into account the inconsistent states of software artifacts across project lifecycle i.e., fully developed and partially developed. This research introduces a new change effort estimation tool (Constructive Change Cost Model or COCHCOMO) that is able to take into account the inconsistent states of software artifacts in its estimation process. This tool was developed based on our extended version of static and dynamic impact analysis techniques. Extensive experiments using several case studies have been conducted in which the results show acceptable error rates have been achieved.