Cost estimation in software engineering is typically concerned with the financial spend on the effort to develop and test the software, this can also include requirements review, maintenance, training, managing and buying extra equipment, servers and software. Many methods have been developed for estimating software costs for a given project.
Methods for estimation in software engineering include these principles:
Most cost software development estimation techniques involve estimating or measuring software size first and then applying some knowledge of historical of cost per unit of size. Software size is typically sized in SLOC, Function Point or Agile story points.