A Kind of 2-Stage Software Life Cycle and Cost Estimation Framework in Agile Methodology from a System Engineering Perspective

Software cost estimate is essential not only for project plans but also for software budgeting. Many researchers research software engineering and software cost estimation from either software engineering or cost perspective. However, this non-systematic perspective or technology path leads to unnecessary conflicts both in academics and in engineering, such as Function Points Analysis treated as a financial or economic research method, software cost estimation treated only as a financial or economic tool, and software cost estimation treated as an unrelated tool to software development engineering. Software development disciplines have a direct and critical relationship to software cost estimation. This paper presents a basic 2-stage life cycle and related cost estimation framework, which illustrates cost structure and expresses in the equation to form a development-maintenance 2-stage module using agile. In this module, we assign software development to the first stage and combine software maintenance to the second stage. Under this framework, software development and cost estimation are connected. We use a quantile-based scale measure(QSC) to analyze and evaluate the percentage of test work in the projects whole work. It is illustrated that the share of the testing workload in the total workload occupies nearly 22<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">%</sup>, and the share of the management workload occupies 13% at toughly.