This paper examines how a team of software professionals goes about estimating the effort of a software project using a judgment-based, bottom-up estimation approach. By employing a social practice perspective that highlights the distributed character of expertise and conceives actions as mediated by cultural tools, the paper analyzes the interactional process through which the estimation tasks...

The object-oriented technological evolution involving the software industry induces changes in the managerial and organizational models for the software-houses. One of the critical issue for software producers is the cost estimation and control. The research described in this paper is aimed to verify the inadequacy of traditional software cost estimation models and to define an innovative model...

Estimating the cost of software is a complex process for almost all engineering companies. Uncertainties about development method, design, estimation process, data, and processing affect the accuracy of estimation. Underestimation results in fewer resources being committed than the project really needs, an unrealistic schedule, and low quality outputs. On the other hand, overestimation wastes r...

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...

Estimating the cost of software is a fundamental and difficult process in information technology (IT) industry. Underestimation causes assigning fewer resources than the project needs and setting an unrealistic schedule. On the other hand, overestimation results in waste of resources and low customer satisfaction. It is clear that, software projects can be prioritized efficiently and resources ...