Investigating the Effect of Using Methodology on Development Effort in Software Projects

Accurate estimation of software development effort needs to consider numerous factors in software projects such as project size, programming language, application type, team size, development platform and so on. Software methodology is one of the most effective parameters in this field. Basically, software methodologies are used in software projects in order to manage activities, artifacts, roles and disciplines. Researchers believe that methodologies can make project managers enable to deal with uncertain and complex nature of software projects. In spite of having noticeably advantages, using the methodologies may lead to inaccurate development effort estimation because there is no analytical evidence to clarify the real effect of using methodology on development effort. Underestimating the amount of effort required for utilizing methodology can have negative influences throughout the project. In this paper, an analysis was performed to draw the real situation of software projects in term of using methodologies. Furthermore, the effect of using methodologies on development effort was investigated to show how methodologies can affect the software development effort. A real and large dataset including 5052 software projects from various areas was used in this study. The results showed high interest to employ methodologies in recent software projects as well as high and significant impact of methodologies on development effort.