Research of software development cost estimation methods is the aim of the paper.
The ability to estimate the cost of the software is necessary for all parties of the evaluation process.
The customer should estimate the financial costs of the acquisition or development. The developer
have to quickly determine the cost of the development and price of the product. But the estimation
can be quite difficult because of the different amounts of initial information. Software as a part
of the IT-market was researched. Existing methods of the software cost evaluation were observed.
Strengths, limitations and recommendations for some software cost evaluation techniques were presented.
The scheme of selecting the appropriate evaluation methods and the scheme of a combined
approach to product cost estimation under different amounts of initial information were described.
Key words
CETIN, UCP, expert evaluation, evaluation by analogy, logical method, SLIM, COCOMO, software cost, evaluation