Quandary Peak Research, a software expert witness firm, applied Costar in the context of a breach-of-contract lawsuit. Costar was used to produce an estimate of the value of an unfinished software product for which the developers were sued for exceeding time and budget estimates.
Betsy Clark & Brad Clark offer a 2 day software estimation course based on COCOMO II.
Donald J. Reifer does COCOMO II training. He also provides training & consulting in software engineering and management.
The USC Center for Software Engineering home page. Softstar Systems is proud to one of the USC Affiliates.
The next COCOMO Meeting at USC. Just for fun, here's info about the First COCOMO/WICOMO User's Group Meeting.
The Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN).
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) home page.
Brad Appleton's Home Page has links to several thousand software engineering sites. He's managed to organize the sites so that it's very easy to find what you need.
The Software Technology Support Center has lots of links to software metrics and process sites.
The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc. is a consulting organization specializing in the complex processes of system building. Tom DeMarco is a principal member of the guild.
Ed Yourdon's web site has a lot of good links to books and people.
Some of Randy Jensen's decades of software estimating wisdom is condensed into a Cost Estimating Guidebook and a new book.
The IFPUG home page.
The International Cost Estimating and Analysis Association home page.
WagerMate contains many relevant modeling lessons.
SystemStar is so easy to use, and so well documented, that you won't need any training to operate the program.
But, to make good estimates, you do need to know about the underlying COCOMO estimation model. To learn just enough to be dangerous, check the COCOMO Overview.
You can learn enough about COCOMO in one afternoon from Software Engineering Economics or Software Cost Estimation with COCOMO II to be making some good estimates. And, please feel free to call us with any of your modeling questions.
We're happy to recommend other sources of training:
Another good way to learn about software estimation is to attend a conference or workshop. This is our favorite:
The next International Forum on COCOMO and Software Cost Modeling.
The 2015 meeting will be at the Software Engineering Institute in Arlington, VA.
This is the best place to learn about COCOMO. The meetings are small (70 to 90 people), and the heroes of the field present their latest work.
Softstar's Founder and President, Dan Ligett, has been on the Program Committee for all 30 of these workshops.
These are some other good sources of information about software estimating:
This book is the best place to start if you want to learn the rules for counting function points.
This group holds annual conferences, teaches courses about Function Points, and refines the counting rules.
ICEAA was formed by the merger of the International Society of Parametric Analysts (ISPA) and the Society of Cost Estimating and Analysis (SCEA) in November 2012.
One of the first papers published about function points. Albrecht developed function points. Good, brief, introduction.