A company needs to develop digital signal processing software for one of its newest inventions. The software is expected to have 40000 lines of code. The company needs to determine the effort in person-months needed to develop this software using the basic COCOMO model. The multiplicative factor for this model is given as 2.8 for the software development on embedded systems, while the exponentiation factor is given as 1.20. What is the estimated effort in person -months?

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Solution

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Official answer: A) 234.25

Software Estimation and Cost Models

According to the basic COCOMO model, the effort equation is:

\text{Effort} = a \times (\text{KLOC})^b

Given:

$\text{Lines of code} = 40000 \implies \text{KLOC} = \frac{40000}{1000} = 40$
Multiplicative factor $a = 2.8$
Exponentiation factor $b = 1.20$

Substitute the values into the formula:

\text{Effort} = 2.8 \times (40)^{1.20}

Calculating $(40)^{1.20}$ :

(40)^{1.20} \approx 83.651

\text{Effort} = 2.8 \times 83.651 \approx 234.22 \text{ person-months}

Hence, the estimated effort is approximately 234.25 person-months, which matches option (A).

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This Software Estimation and Cost Models previous year question is Q7 of the GATE CSE 2011 paper. Find more GATE CSE PYQs on Software Estimation and Cost Models in Software Engineering, or browse all GATE CSE PYQs.

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Software Estimation and Cost Models in GATE CSE

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Independent practice explanation verified by the GateAI team. GATE is conducted by the IITs; question text follows the official paper.