Software Cost Estimation Framework for Service-Oriented Architecture Systems Using Divide-and-Conquer Approach

Due to the complexity of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), cost and effort estimation for SOA-based software development is more difficult than that for traditional software development. Unfortunately, there is a lack of published work about cost and effort estimation for SOA-based software. Existing cost estimation approaches are inadequate to address the complex service-oriented systems. This paper proposes a novel framework based on Divide-and-Conquer (D&C) for cost estimation for building SOA-based software. By dealing with separately development parts, the D&C framework can help organizations simplify and regulate SOA implementation cost estimation. Furthermore, both cost estimation modeling and software sizing work can be satisfied respectively by switching the corresponding metrics within this framework. Given the requirement of developing these metrics, this framework also defines the future research in four different directions according to the separate cost estimation sub-problems.