Expert judgement is still the dominant technique in practice today for estimation of software project size and effort. In this paper, two instruments are evaluated that have been frequently suggested as effective support for human estimators: checklists and group discussions. A student experiment has been conducted to investigate how checklists and group discussions help estimators to improve t...

—Traditional cost estimation models in software engineering are based on the concept of productivity defined as the ratio of output to input; for instance, detailed software estimation models, such as COCOMO, can take multiple factors into account, but their multipliers lead to a single perspective based on the productivity concept. A less explored relationship in software engineering is the on...

This contribution deals with problems related to an effort estimation of the software projects which are connected to the development of secured products. The aim of this contribution is to present an option of an effective consideration of the effort which is connected with the software products development. The FPA and COCOMO II methods for cost estimation are extended by the security factors...

Complexity and development effort estimation models are developed based on a set of Component Oriented metrics. Our view focuses on the efforts for the identification and the integration of existing components, as the most important types of development activities in this emerging paradigm. The metrics set that is used in this research, therefore, is specifically configured considering the comp...

Although Functional Size Measurement (FSM) methods have become widely used by the software organizations, the functional size based effort estimation still needs further investigation. Most of the studies on effort estimation consider total functional size of the software as the primary input to estimation models and they mostly focus on identifying the project parameters which might have a sig...

In a recent May 2007 IEEE TSE article, Kitchenham et.al. explored effort estimation and found contradictory evidence about the value of crossvs within-company data. Those contradictory results may have been the result of effort estimation features, some of which are subjective in nature. Static code features are different than effort estimation features. They can be generated in an automatic, r...

This paper discusses a model for effort estimation. This model focuses on minimizing effort variance by enhancing the adjustments made to the functional sizing techniques. A special focus is made on the adjustment factors which reflect the application’s complexity and actual environment in which this application will be implemented. We introduce the idea of grouping the adjustment factors to si...

A software vendor sometimes contracts the maintenance of a software product that other software vendors gave up maintaining due to costs etc. In such case, the vendor must estimate costs of maintenance before contracting. However, due to lack of an objective measure, an expert estimates the cost on the basis of his/her experience. We will propose some metrics for estimating maintenance effort. ...

Cost estimation process becomes a crucial factor in any software development project. An effective software estimate provides the information needed to design a workable software development plan. An effective software estimate provides important information for making project decisions, projecting performance and defining objectives and plans. Without the proper guidance in a project, the resu...

Estimation of cost and time to develop a software product P is a well known problem. Among the possible ways to do it is analogy with old finished projects. We describe an experiment using different versions of the Fuzzy c-Means algorithm, to find projects similar to P . Then the information about these projects is used to estimate the effort needed to build P .