Predicting Software Development Cost for Command and Control Systems

Our nation is spending increasingly more dollars to develop software systems. Likewise, the Department of Defense (DoD) allocates more and more dollars to develop software. Consequently, the DoD needs to be able to accurately estimate what these systems' cost so they can develop reliable budgets. To estimate these software costs, the DoD relies on commercial software estimating tools. However, these tools are somewhat unreliable when it comes to estimating military systems, particularly Command, Control, and Communication Systems. The purpose of this study was to develop a parametric model using linear regression to estimate software development costs for Department of Defense Command, Control, and Communications systems.