Standardized cost estimation in Thai government´s software development projects

Software features and costs are often unquantifiable due to the abstract nature of software. In many cases, this results in the estimated costs of software development projects to be potentially highly biased, highly inaccurate, or highly unjustified. Hence, current software estimation methodologies can open up areas for corruption as estimated budgets and costs are difficult to verify and validate. The Thai COCOMO Framework and cost estimation model were developed in order to overcome this problem in software development projects for Thai government by providing standard and transparency to the software estimation process with justification to the associated costs. This paper discusses the areas in software project estimation that are prone to corruption and ways that the COCOMO model and framework can be used to address them.