Many software cost estimation models suggest a one-size-fit-all effort distribution patterns as the basis of their guidelines for resource allocation on software development activities. This set of distribution percentages is generally developed from experiences with limited data support. In this paper, we will examine a set of real world data points and share our findings that uncover the sign...

Software development has become an important activity for many modern organizations (Pressman, 1997). In fact the quality, cost, and timeliness of developed software are often crucial determinants of an organization’s success. There are significant financial and strategic implications for development projects in terms of activity scheduling and cost estimation. Software cost estimation is one o...

Despite the progress in agent oriented software engineering, there is still a long way before achieving maturity. Among others, there is a lack of shared experience in evaluating the cost when developing software using the agent paradigm. This paper provides some results on this issue. It collects data from real agent based projects and gives hints for the application of existing software cost ...

The unresolved problems of improving software engineering management require a broader systemic approach of investigating related issues like software development productivity. The paper links software engineering management to research on software cost estimation and on factors affecting software development productivity. It examines ways for the systemic incorporation of all issues influencin...

predicting the effort of a successful project has been a major problem for software engineers the significance of which has led to extensive investigation in this area. One of the main objectives of software engineering society is the development of useful models to predict the costs of software product development. The absence of these activities before starting the project will lead to variou...

This paper revisits the conclusion instability problem identified by Kitchenham, Foss, Myrtveit et.al.; i.e. conclusions regarding which software effort estimation method is “best” is highly contingent on (1) the evaluation criteria and (2) the subset of the data used in the evaluation. Using non-parametric methods (the Mann-Whitney U test), we show how to avoid conclusion instability. This pap...

Software effort estimation research shows that there is no universal agreement on the “best” effort estimation approach. This is largely due to the “ranking instability” problem, which is highly contingent on the evaluation criteria and the subset of the data used in the investigation. There are a large number of different method combination exists for software effort estimation, selecting the ...

Software development effort estimation is important for quality management in the software development industry, yet its automation still remains a challenging issue. Applying machine learning algorithms alone often can not achieve satisfactory results. In this paper, we present an integrated data mining framework that incorporates domain knowledge into a series of data analysis and modeling pr...