COTS Integrations: Effort Estimation Best Practices

COTS integration is well accepted and is a viable solution offering for most of business problems. In this paper we enhance the basic effort estimation methodology to align to more requirements centric approach for development, testing and deployment. The paper is structured with best practices to ease projects that involve multiple estimation cycles with extremely high requirements volatility. The estimation approach and practices mentioned can be used as a reusable approach for estimations across multiple COTS integrations.