One of the major activities in effective and efficient production of software projects is the precise estimation of software development effort. Estimation of the effort in primary steps of software development is one of the most important challenges in managing software projects. Some reasons for these challenges such as: discordant software projects, the complexity of the manufacturing proces...

Web Effort Estimation is a process of predicting the efforts and cost in terms of money, schedule and staff for any software project system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades and it is believed that it is a must for the purpose of: Budgeting, risk analysis, project planning and control, and project improvement investment analysis. In this paper, we investigat...

There are numerous forecast models of software development costs, however, various problems become apparent in context to practical application. Standardized methods, such as COCOMO II have to be calibrated at an individual operational level on the basis of the underlying database. This paper presents a new activity based approach that is based on business specific cost data that can be easily ...

The Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T) is the premier forum where researchers and practitioners interested in software engineering education (SEE) and training come together to assess the existing state of the art and practice in SEE, to exchange ideas, and to define and identify new directions in the field. The 19th CSEE&T was held in Turtle Bay, Hawaii in April...

1. Software Project Cost Estimation The development and use of effective and efficient methods for estimating the costs of software development remain difficult challenges in software engineering. Many studies have shown wide discrepancies between estimates and actual costs and completion schedules of software development (e.g., [Vijayakumar 19971). Project managers strive to make accurate esti...

The process of resolving cost-requirements conflicts is difficult because of incompatibilities among stakeholders’ interests and priorities, complex costrequirements dependencies, and an exponentially increasing option space for larger systems. This paper describes an exploratory knowledge-based tool, the Software Cost Option Strategy Tool (S-COST), for assisting stakeholders to surface appropr...

This paper analyses the accuracy of predictions for software development effort using various machine learning techniques. The main aim is to investigate the stability of these predictions by analyzing if particular techniques achieve a similar level of accuracy for different datasets. Two key assumptions are that (1) predictions are performed using local empirical data and (2) very little expe...

Models of software projects input project details and output predictions via their internal tunings. The output predictions, therefore, are affected by variance in the project details P and variance in the internal tunings T. Local data is often used to constrain the internal tunings (reducing T). While constraining internal tunings with local data is always the preferred option, there exist so...