What is COCOMO?
COCOMO (Constructive Cost Model) is the most widely-used software cost estimation model, created by Barry Boehm in 1981. It takes the number of lines of code and applies empirically-derived formulas to estimate how many person-months of effort, calendar months, and developers it would take to build the software from scratch. The “organic” mode used here assumes a small-to-medium team working with familiar technology.
The formulas (COCOMO Basic, organic mode):Effort = 2.4 × (KSLOC)
1.05 person-months
Schedule = 2.5 × (Effort)
0.38 months
Team = Effort ÷ Schedule
Cost = Effort × ($56,286/yr salary × 2.4× overhead)
KSLOC = thousands of source lines of code
Why Schedule = 2.5 × Effort0.38?Development time grows with effort, but not in a straight line. Why not just Time = Effort ÷ People? Because that assumes work is perfectly divisible — which software work is not. Just as 10 chefs cannot cook a meal in 1/10th the time (they’d be tripping over each other in the kitchen), adding developers speeds things up but also adds communication overhead, coordination delays, and dependencies between tasks. The
0.38 exponent captures this: as effort goes up, time goes up too — but slower, because some work runs in parallel. The
2.5 constant is a calibration factor derived by
Barry Boehm from 63 real projects, anchoring the formula to match observed durations.
What is the 2.4× overhead?
The COCOMO model multiplies raw salary by 2.4× to reflect the fully-loaded cost of employment. This covers: office space and facilities, health insurance and benefits, management and HR, equipment and software licenses, training, recruitment, and administrative overhead. The 2.4× multiplier is a standard industry figure — in practice, the total cost of a developer to a company is typically 2–3× their base salary.
What it doesn't capture:
AI-assisted development, domain expertise ramp-up, data fixture creation, deployment infrastructure, or the 801 commits of iterative refinement and domain expert consultation across the project lifetime.
Actual vs estimated:
This 105,753 SLOC codebase was built by 1 developer + AI in ~35 days (801 commits since 2026-03-25). COCOMO estimates 14.3 developers over 22.4 months — demonstrating significant productivity leverage from AI-assisted domain-driven development.