COnstructive COst MOdel II (COCOMO® III) is a model that allows one to estimate the cost, effort, and schedule when planning a new software development activity. COCOMO III is under development as an extension of the COCOMO II model.
COCOMO® III will meet the following use cases:
- Making investment or other financial decisions involving a software development effort
- Setting project budgets and schedules as a basis for planning and control
- Deciding on or negotiating tradeoffs among software cost, schedule, functionality, performance or quality factors
- Making software cost and schedule risk management decisions
- Deciding which parts of a software system to develop, reuse, lease, or purchase
- Making legacy software inventory decisions: what parts to modify, phase out, outsource, etc
- Setting mixed investment strategies to improve organization’s software capability, via reuse, tools, process maturity, outsourcing, etc
- Deciding how to implement a process improvement strategy, such as that provided in the SEI CMM
The original COCOMO® model was first published by Dr. Barry Boehm in 1981, and reflected the software development practices of the day.