Software project development cost estimation
Journal of Systems and Software
On program development effort and productivity
Information and Management
An empirical validation of software cost estimation models
Communications of the ACM
Improving Software Productivity
Computer
Calibrating a software cost estimation model: why and how
Information and Software Technology
Software engineering metrics and models
Software engineering metrics and models
Economics of software project management in Tunisia: basic TUCOMO
Information and Software Technology
Scale Economies in New Software Development
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Information and Management
Building tailor-made software cost model: intermediate TUCOMO
Information and Software Technology - Information and software economics
Empirical studies of assumptions that underlie software cost-estimation models
Information and Software Technology
A theory of software production
A theory of software production
Towards a Software Factory
Software Engineering Economics
Software Engineering Economics
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Softw
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Softw
Measures for Excellence: Reliable Software on Time, within Budget
Measures for Excellence: Reliable Software on Time, within Budget
Software Development Cost Estimation Using Function Points
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Experience With the Accuracy of Software Maintenance Task Effort Prediction Models
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A meta-model for software development resource expenditures
ICSE '81 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Software engineering
Prediction of software effort and project duration: four new formulas
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Explaining the cost of European space and military projects
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering
Software Cost Estimation with Incomplete Data
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Comments on: Evaluating Alternative Software Production Functions
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Empirical Software Engineering
An empirical study of the Cobb-Douglas production function properties of software development effort
Information and Software Technology
IWSM '09 /Mensura '09 Proceedings of the International Conferences on Software Process and Product Measurement
The study of resource allocation among software development phases: an economics-based approach
Advances in Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
A distributed problem-solving framework for probabilistic software effort estimation
Expert Systems: The Journal of Knowledge Engineering
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Software development projects are notorious for cost overruns and schedule delays. While dozens of software cost models have been proposed, few of them seem to have any degree of consistent accuracy. One major factor contributing to this persistent and wide spread problem is an inadequate understanding of the real behavior of software development processes. We believe that software development could be studied as an economic production process and that established economic theories and methods could be used to develop and validate software production and cost models. Here, we present the results of evaluating four alternative software production models using the P-test, a statistical procedure developed specifically for testing the truth of a hypothesis in the presence of alternatives in econometric studies. We found that the truth of the widely used Cobb-Douglas type of software production and cost models (e.g., COCOMO) cannot be maintained in the presence of quadratic or translog models. Overall, the quadratic software production function is shown to be the most plausible model for representing software production processes. Limitations of this study and future directions are also discussed.