Estimating the effort of software development is fraught with difficulties, and it is clear that effort should be invested in improving the accuracy and the reliability (consistency) of effort estimates, as well as the assessment of estimate uncertainty. However, it is less clear where to target such improvement efforts. We discuss the degree to which it is feasible to improve the expertise of ...

The four studies included in this paper examine the strength of the first impression in the estimation of work effort. The studied context is mainly one where the first impressions of software development effort is manipulated (biased) through comparisons with either much too low or too high reference effort values, e.g., by responding to a question from the client whether one believes that the...

Calibration, has been .found to be difficult in practice. Wide experience in using the estimation model is necessary; experience which the beginner naturally lacks. This paper indicates why it is important to calibrate a model and how the inexperienced user can be helped by an expert system. In addition, the development of, and experience with, the prototype of an expert system are described. T...

Effort estimation is a key factor for software project success, defined as delivering software of agreed quality and functionality within schedule and budget. Traditionally, effort estimation has been used for planning and tracking project resources. Effort estimation methods founded on those goals typically focus on providing exact estimates and usually do not support objectives that have rece...

Software cost estimation is an important phase in software development. It predicts the amount of effort and development time required to build a software system. It is one of the most critical tasks and an accurate estimate provides a strong base to the development procedure. There are many cost estimation models for the estimation of the software. COCOMO model is the basic model. In this pape...

This paper summarizes several classes of software cost estimation models and techniques: parametric models, expertise-based techniques, learning-oriented techniques, dynamics-based models, regression-based models, and composite-Bayesian techniques for integrating expertisebased and regression-based models. Experience to date indicates that neural-net and dynamics-based techniques are less matur...

Expert judgment for software effort estimation is oriented toward direct evidences that refer to actual effort of similar projects or activities through experts’ experiences. However, the availability of direct evidences implies the requirement of suitable experts together with past data. The circumstantial-evidence-based judgment proposed in this paper focuses on the development experiences de...

Many cost estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades. In this study, we investigate fuzzy ID3 decision tree as a method for software effort estimation. Fuzzy ID software effort estimation model is designed by incorporating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the concepts of the fuzzy settheoretic; permitting the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when present...

Although there is broad agreement on the sorts of things to take into account when measuring functional size, there is a variety of opinion about how to do it. This is partly because several different views of functionality are addressed in functional size measurement. Some are better understood than others. In particular, the “general systems characteristics” (GSC’s) and “value adjustment fact...

Despite the predictive performance of AnalogyBased Estimation (ABE) in generating better effort estimates, there is no consensus on: (1) how to predetermine the appropriate number of analogies, (2) which adjustment technique produces better estimates. Yet, there is no prior works attempted to optimize both number of analogies and feature distance weights for each test project. Perhaps rather th...