Sagar Sunkle, Vinay Kulkarni. Cost estimation for model-driven engineering. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. pages 659-675, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. [doi]
Cost estimation studies in model-driven engineering (MDE) are scarce; first, due to difficulty in quantifying qualitative characteristics of MDE that supposedly influence software development effort and second, due to the complexity of measuring varied artifacts that are generated and used in an end-to-end MDE toolset. A cost estimation approach is therefore needed that can incorporate characteristics of MDE that affect economies of scale and effort in application development with the size computation of various artifacts in MDE. We plan to use the constructive cost model (COCOMO) II to obtain baseline cost estimation of MDE applications. Our main contributions are a method to capture the qualitative characteristics of MDE in terms of cost drivers in COCOMO II and a method for computation of various artifacts generated by an MDE toolset. Our initial exploration of these ideas suggests that it is possible to automate cost estimation for MDE.