Effort Distribution to Estimate Cost in Small to Medium Software Development Project with Use Case Points

The Use Case Points (UCP) has been a method that often used as a reference to calculate effort estimation, the amount of worker and time required in software development project. In Reality, software project planning has not been only effort estimation, but also cost estimation to estimate how much cost of resource allocation spent in software development. Result of the effort estimation using UCP is the number of effort required to develop the software as a whole. In fact, the determination of the cost of software development is based on the cost per activity of pay rate different in each phase of software development. Therefore it requires the distribution of effort per activity to get the cost of software development. To produce cost estimation in the software development project, we need to know the percentage of each phase of software development, in this case called the effort distribution. The percentage of effort distribution was obtained through the collection of empirical data of governance's software development in small to medium scale. In this study, it was used 15 small and medium-sized projects of software development in Indonesia that was completed. The findings of this study was the value of the percentage of effort to the three categories of phases of the software development, namely: the percentage of the phase of software development at 72.6%, the percentage of the phase of the on-going life-cycle activities amounted to 17.5%, and a phase of quality control and testing amounted to 9.9 %. While the percentage of detail presented in this paper. Another result of this study was the steps to determine the estimated costs for software development with UCP method. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.