Software Cost Estimation for Mobile Application Development - A Comparative Study of COCOMO Models

Software effort estimation is a crucial stage in the process of software project development including mobile application development. It is required to assist the project manager on deciding the project outlining, staff resources evaluation, cost estimation, quality control, and benchmarking. The methods of estimation can be categorized into parametric and non-parametric methods. This paper analyses and compares two algorithmic methods, namely Constructive Cost Model II (COCOMO II) and Constructive System Engineering Cost Model (COSYSMO) in calculating the effort for mobile application development. The experiment is conducted based on COCOMO datasets, and the experiment result is evaluated using the Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE). We found that the COCOMO II is a more suitable parametric effort estimation for mobile applications with the MMRE value of 0.4805. For future research, the cost drivers which are related to the mobile software aspects should be added.