Estimating the Effort of Independent Verification and Validation in the Context of Mission-critical Software Systems - A Case Study

The ability to generate sufficiently accurate effort estimates can be seen as a key success factor for multiorganizational projects focusing on the development of large and critical software systems. This is caused, for instance, by the need for synchronizing multiple development and verification and validation processes. Paradoxically, effort predictions in the critical software systems domain are still relying on human judgment. This requires much overhead and its reliability depends largely on the expertise and individual preferences of the involved experts. In particular, verification and validation by independent entity (IV&V) needs an estimation method that supports negotiating and managing IV&V costs in the context of sparse measurement data and low availability of domain experts. In order to address these problems, in this paper we propose applying a hybrid effort estimation method called CoBRA for estimating effort for IV&V of mission-critical software systems. When applied in an industrial context, CoBRA improved estimation accuracy and precision by about 40%, on average, compared to experts estimates and OLS regression.