METHODS OF ESTIMATING THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT BUDGET

Abstract

Software is currently used in all areas of human activity and is critical for many industries. Software development is a complex and resource-intensive process, the development team can have several dozen employees. There are also many risks during program development, such as inconvenience between the customer and developers, unnecessary expenditure of resources on fixing errors and exceeding the available time to meet the project requirements and the development budget, and as a result – the development failure and even the closure of the project.To avoid the worst-case scenarios in software development, various methods for estimating the development budget are continuously improved. These methods are based on different concepts and ideas, taking into account various aspects and parameters of the project. The paper analyzes existing estimating methods and examines the advantages and disadvantages of their practical use.After the analysis, a software product was developed for calculating the cost of program development, which used the parametric evaluation method with the heuristic coefficients. The parametric method takes into account each project parameter, such as development stages, development team, time for development of each stage of the task, availability of a development budget margin, to prevent budget exhaustion in case of unforeseen situations, such as equipment failure or involvement of additional developers. The use of the heuristic coefficients adds realism to the calculations due to the introduced coefficients of developer productivity and the complexity of the stages of software development.As a result of using this method and development experience from previous projects to determine the complexity of the stages and the productivity of developers depending on their experience qualitative calculations of the possible cost of software development were obtained. The results are displayed in the form of a graph and saved in a text file for a more detailed analysis of the cost of each specified stage of the software development project.