Forecasting the Budget Required for Software under Development

Abstract

Approximating the budget of software is continuously vital problem for the software analysts to agree on the development of a project. Diverse methods for estimating the budget of software are used in literature based on the preferred reliability level as per client’s demand. Based on the literature a close correlation is found between software budget and its reliability. Hence, the architectural design of software is studied here using Discrete Time Markovian Chain (DTMC) for approximating its reliability and its association with software budget. Primarily, a conventional cost model known as generalized software cost model is used for evaluation of the software budget for eleven datasets obtained from literature. The proposed methodology is afterward used for approximation of the software budget and its overall reliability. The proposed methodology is then used to solve single objective problems of minimizing cost of software keeping reliability as constraint and maximizing reliability by keeping cost as constraint. At final, the proposed approach is used to analyse the software cost and reliability trade-off to provide best multi-objective solution to software clients.