Assessment and comparison of common software cost estimation modeling techniques

Two essential questions related to data-driven, software cost modeling are investigated: What modeling techniques are likely to yield more accurate results when using typical software development cost data? What are the benefits and drawbacks of using organization-specific data as compared to multi-organization databases? To address the first issue, a selection of common cost modeling techniques which fulfill a number of important criteria was used with a large multi-organization database in the business application domain. The latter question is important to assess the feasibility of using multi-organization cost databases to build cost models and the benefits gained from local, company-specific data collection and modeling.