According to Boehm, software cost estimation should be done through three stages?

Basic COCOMO Model: The basic COCOMO model provide an accurate size of the project parameters. The following expressions give the basic COCOMO estimation model:

Effort=a1*(KLOC) a2 PM
Tdev=b1*(efforts)b2 Months
Where
KLOC is the estimated size of the software product indicate in Kilo Lines of Code,

a1,a2,b1,b2 are constants for each group of software products,

Tdev is the estimated time to develop the software, expressed in months,
Effort is the total effort required to develop the software product, expressed in person months (PMs).

Estimation of development effort

For the three classes of software products, the formulas for estimating the effort based on the code size are shown below:

Organic: Effort = 2.4(KLOC) 1.05 PM

Semi-detached: Effort = 3.0(KLOC) 1.12 PM

Embedded: Effort = 3.6(KLOC) 1.20 PM
Estimation of development time

For the three classes of software products, the formulas for estimating the development time based on the effort are given below:

Organic: Tdev = 2.5(Effort) 0.38 Months

Semi-detached: Tdev = 2.5(Effort) 0.35 Months

Embedded: Tdev = 2.5(Effort) 0.32 Months

Some insight into the basic COCOMO model can be obtained by plotting the estimated characteristics for different software sizes. Fig shows a plot of estimated effort versus product size. From fig, we can observe that the effort is somewhat superliner in the size of the software product. Thus, the effort required to develop a product increases very rapidly with project size