Abstract
As software development and maintenance cost increase quickly, information systems managers are more concerned about how to effectively manage software cost. To estimate the software development cost, most public institutes of Korea use the software cost estimation standard established by the government. Unfortunately, the accuracy of the estimation derived from the standard has not been satisfactory in spite of repetitive modifications made to improve it. One of the major reasons for the inaccuracy is that the standard has too small a number of cost adjustment factors to reflect the various characteristics of a software development project. To remedy this problem, we propose new cost adjustment factors which can be incorporated into the standard and are important to enhance the estimation accuracy, based on the analysis of several well-known software estimation models. Furthermore, by applying the proposed model to real world software projects, we show that the proposed model can produce more accurate estimates than the current standard.