Design of a cost calculation model and development of a database backed web application to host it

With the increased expansion in the complexity surrounding the application support within a number of companies, there has been an increasing need for proper tools that can efficiently and accurately manage and calculate cost for application support. This thesis makes an attempt towards the creation of a web hosted, database backed application that intends to aid the decision makers in projecting and managing costs associated with supporting existing and new applications. This thesis work presents the design and development of cost calculation model hosted as a database-backed web application. It enables decision makers to estimate, allocate, supervise and render support services concerning both existing and new applications. The model serves other functions such as providing custom reports and integrated dashboards. This model directly provides estimate reports which significantly reduces manual work concerning effort estimation. The model is developed with an objective of automated support cost calculation, with reapective determination to application support historical data and other parameters such as number of production and pre production servers, Request for Service, Incident Management, Problem Management and application criticality.. For new applications, where less data is available, the model utilizes parameters like production and pre-production servers and application criticality to estimate support costs by extrapolating from historical trends. The work is concentrated in the cost calculation for both existing and new applications. A cost calculation algorithm is formulated by utilizing the historical data. The Algorithm takes into account the patterns and assumptions derived from the historical data. The algorithm is then implemented in the web application backend that integrates a robust database for storing and retrieving the necessary parameters for the cost calculation