Estimating the effort overhead in global software development

Models for effort and cost estimation are important or distributed software development as well as for collocated oftware and system development. Standard cost models only nsufficiently consider the characteristics of distributed evelopment such as dissimilar abilities at the different sites or ignificant overhead due to remote collaboration. Therefore, xplicit cost models for distributed development are needed. In his article, we present the initial development of a cost verhead model for a Spanish global software development rganization. The model was developed using the CoBRA pproach for cost estimation. As a result, cost drivers for the secific distributed development context were identified and their impact was quantified on an empirical basis. The article presents related work, an overview of the approach, and its application in the industrial context. Finally, we sketch the inclusion of the model in an approach for systematic task allocation and give an overview of future work.