Building tailor-made software cost model: Intermediate TUCOMO

Success in software engineering depends primarily on managerial considerations, which are in turn contingent on an accurate and reliable cost-estimation procedure. Among the many software cost-estimation procedures available today, COCOMO stands out by its concern for accuracy and the thoroughness of its procedures. But COCOMO is calibrated to a specific profile of projects and performs best when it is applied to a project of that specific profile. The paper discusses an effort to build a COCOMO-like, tailor-made cost-estimation model. Guidelines are given on how to calibrate Intermediate COCOMO to an arbitrary project profile.