A Requirements-Based Model for Effort Estimation in Service-Oriented Systems

Assessing the development costs of an application remains an arduous task for many project managers. Using new technologies and specific software architectures makes this job even more complicated. In order to help people in charge of this kind of work, we propose a model for estimating the effort required to implement a service-oriented system. Its starting point lies in the requirements and the specifications of the system-to-be. It is able to provide an estimate of the development effort needed. The latter is expressed in a temporal measurement unit, easily convertible into a monetary value. The model proposed takes into account the three types of system complexity, i.e., the structural, the conceptual and the computational complexity.