Both Agile Software Development (ASD) and Global Software Development (GSD) are 21 century trends in the software industry. Many studies are reported in the literature wherein software companies have applied an agile method or practice GSD. Given that effort estimation plays a remarkable role in software project management, how do companies perform effort estimation when they use agile method i...

According to a study of The Standish Group International, 44% of software projects cost more and last longer than expected. More accurate the effort estimation is; the better the enterprise gets organized and the more the software project respects the commitments on budget, time and quality. Enhancing the accuracy of effort estimation remains an ongoing challenge to software professionals. Seve...

This paper describes an empirical study of effort estimation in agile software development. Estimated effort and actual effort of a 46-iteration project are collected and analyzed. The results show that estimation in agile development is more accurate than that in traditional development even though agile developers still underestimate the effort. However, estimation accuracy is not improved ov...

Agile manufacturing (AM) is a 21 century concept in manufacturing firm intended to improve the competitiveness of firms. Manufacturing process based on AM is characterized by customer-supplier integrated process for product design, manufacturing, marketing and support services. This needs decision-making at functional knowledge levels, stable unit cost, flexible manufacturing, easy access to in...

OBJECTIVE – The objective of this paper is to describe a case study where Bayesian Networks (BNs) were used to construct an expert-based Web effort model. METHOD – We built a single-company BN model solely elicited from expert knowledge, where the domain expert was an experienced Web project manager from a small Web company in Auckland, New Zealand. This model was validated using data from eigh...

A cornerstone of software project management is effort estimation, the process by which effort is forecasted and used as basis to predict costs and allocate resources effectively, so enabling projects to be delivered on time and within budget. Effort estimation is a very complex domain where the relationship between factors is non-deterministic and has an inherently uncertain nature, and where ...

This paper presents an empirical study of effort estimation. In particular, the study is focused on improvements in effort estimations as more information becomes available. For example, after the requirements phase, the requirements specification is available and the question is whether the knowledge regarding the number of requirements helps in improving the effort estimation of the project. ...

Project-based learning is a kind of learning activity which has great educative effect, but which presents also several issues. In particular, if we consider an university course that requires the design and the implementation of a software project, may be difficult to estimate the number of hours that a team of students has to take to accomplish that project. There is the risk to underestimate...

Project planning is one of the most important activities in software projects. Poor planning often leads to project faults and dramatic outcomes for the project team. If cost and effort are determined pessimistic in software projects, suitable occasions can be missed; whereas optimistic predictions can be caused to some resource losing. Nowadays software project managers should be aware of the ...

Software cost estimation is a process to calculate effort, time and cost of a project, and assist in better decision making about the feasibility or viability of project. Accurate cost prediction is required to effectively organize the project development tasks and to make economical and strategic planning, project management. There are several known and unknown factors affect this process, so ...