Cost Estimation In Project Management

Abstract In globally distributed environment, software cost estimation has significant importance for the success of project management to assure a high quality product. But software cost estimation for such projects becomes challenge due to distributed offshore and onshore development and many factors come into arise such as communication, team culture, task allocation and client involvement which effects the software cost estimation. In this paper we have proposed a “Fuzzy Analytical Network Process” (FANP) to assess the cost estimation factors in distributed agile projects in order to select potential “Global Software Development” (GSD) projects with minimum cost. Our main goal is to discover and assess such cost estimation factors which

Introduction
Recently Global Software development (GSD) becomes an emerging market to develop a high quality software product by saving time and cost. As a result organizations are gradually moving towards globally distributed environment because of these significant benefits. A large number of organizations are still continued to expand their development globally and distribute their teams around the world with the aim of offshoring and outsourcing. In this way organizations have opportunities to grow their work with the contribution of thousands of skilled workers located around the world[1].
Despite the fact that GSD has many benefits, there are many problems tend to fail global software projects due to its distributed environment. Software cost estimation for such projects becomes challenging due to factors such as work dispersion, communication, team culture, task allocation, client involvement. To expand their work across several time zones require more effort and activities such as team building, different knowledge for collaboration, an architecture required to easily distribute and minimize cross-site communication. In this way different tasks are carried out in distributed environment, as a result different factors affect cost estimation of GSD

In Section 2 related work is discussed. Different cost estimation factors concept is defined in section 3. Proposed approach FANP is discussed in Section 4. In Section 5 FANP application in GSD is discussed. Results and discussion of cost estimation factors are discussed in section 6. In last, paper conclusion is discussed in Section 7.
2. Related Work Several works in this area have been addressed to characterize significance of cost estimation factors in GSD projects. A Q-methodology is used to discover different factors which affect the success of GSD projects. Based on this methodology, factors are ranked by practitioners through survey and results are presented based on these ranking to show different challenges arise in the form of geographical, temporal and socio-cultural differences[5]. To determine GSD project outcome an assessment framework is proposed which evaluate the criteria of different knowledge, software technology, and development team and organization factors. For the assessment of framework a “fuzzy decision making and evaluator laboratory”(DEMATEL) and “fuzzy multi-criteria decision making” (FMCDM) approaches are integrated to determine priority weight of each factors in order to evaluate the outcome of GSD