Evaluation of cost estimating methods for military software application in a COTS environment

Abstract

Due to changes in the economy, the Department of Defense is requiring dramatic changes in its procurement process for major systems. These changes attempt to leverage from the large quantity of commercial software that is currently on the. market. As a result, better estimating techniques are required to properly account for software reuse. For government agencies, these techniques must be understood and applied when validating and tracking contractor performance. An industry survey was performed and subsequently two techniques were evaluated. The evaluation criteria used is consistent with the attributes of the systems engineering process. This project will evaluate the two most widely used; function point analysis and rule of thumb analysis were selected for computing the cost of a specified software intensive project.