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...

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...

It is well documented that the software industry suffers from frequent cost overruns. A contributing factor is, we believe, the imprecise estimation terminology in use. A lack of clarity and precision in the use of estimation terms reduces the interpretability of estimation accuracy results, makes the communication of estimates difficult, and lowers the learning possibilities. This paper report...

Discussions with software developers from a number of business organisations were targeted at the effect of estimation practices on the success or failure of some of the software development projects with which they had been involved. Several important estimation topics were also covered in a questionnaire. Our results show that for only one-third of the projects were the project managers invol...

In the software development process, effort distribution based on phase is an important but often a neglected aspect of software cost estimation. Insufficient phase effort distribution study is the primary reason of poor software effort estimation. This paper provides the results of an empirical study on phase effort distribution based on 2956 projects. The software development process is divid...

Expert-based estimation is the most common and preferred method to estimate the effort for software development project because it is fast, less expensive and reasonably accuracy. Expert software developers use his intuition and experience during effort estimation task. Estimation by analogy of features is also used to compare the new feature to similar in past development. This paper extends r...

Software project managers have expressed concern over their inability to estimate accurately the costs associated with software development. Various cost estimation methods are available for use in software development process but concern lies in selecting better software cost estimation model to arrive at accurate cost estimation. This paper gave an overview of software cost estimation and ans...

We present an assessment of an empirical study aiming at building effort estimation models for corrective maintenance projects. We show results from the application of the prediction models to a new corrective maintenance project within the same enterprise and the same type of software systems used in a previous study. The data available for the new project are finer grained according to the in...