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...

Effort is the main cost in software development projects, and software size is the main input for effort estimation. Project managers need to have sound size estimations to estimate required software effort. The inputs for size estimation models are generally software artifacts that are produced later in software development life cycle; however project managers need the estimations prior to the...

Cost estimation of software projects is an important activity that continues to be a source of problems for practitioners despite improvement efforts. Most of the research on estimation has focused on methodological issues while the research focused on human factors primarily has targeted cognitive biases or perceived inhibitors. This paper focuses on the complex organizational context of estim...