I am looking for a method to decide on the price for a J2EE project that we developed. I know of COCOMO model but dont know if there are any tools/plugins (preferably on eclipse) to calculate the cost. A very naive method of deciding the cost of development would be to associate a price to every Kilo Line of Code. If this is right, how much is the industry standard for these things. Thanks in advance.
+2
A:
For the cost, a simple metric is going to be the man-hour cost, plus the cost of tooling (probably negligible if it's a large project), plus ancillary facilities.
Someone in your organisation will have the figures for the cost of a developer per hour. It's not the same as how much you pay them. It will include equipment, office space, heating, additional benefits etc. You'll probably find this is quite high, and why I say for anything more than the most trivial project, costs of tooling (e.g. IDEs) is going to be negligible.
Do you have shared servers/a machine room etc.? Someone will have the figures for this and you need to determine what proportion you used.
I don't think you can derive any meaningful cost figure simply by looking at the code.
Now, if you're looking at pricing, then all the above doesn't matter, since you've already spent it. You have to look at what the market is prepared to pay. For that, I can direct you to no better article than one written by Joel Spolsky himself, which discusses some basic economic theory including the concept of consumer surplus.
Brian Agnew
2009-07-27 09:07:08
Wow thanks for the article. Yes, I messed up by adding costing and pricing into the same paragraph. But Spolsky's article makes a lot of sense.
Ritesh M Nayak
2009-07-28 07:19:45
+1
A:
I don't know anyone who prices software by the number of lines coded. That doesn't make any sense.
We always price projects in the amount of hours it takes. 80 hours, 200 hours etc. The hourly rate here in Norway is about 1000-1500NOK ($180-250). Most companies we hire or buy from do the same.
Tommy
2009-07-27 09:08:17