Visualizing Software Project Analogies to Support Cost Estimation

Software cost estimation is a crucial task in software project portfolio decisions like start scheduling, resource allocation, or bidding. A variety of estimation methods have been proposed to support estimators. Especially the analogy-based approach—based on a project’s similarities with past projects—has been reported as both efficient and relatively transparent. However, its performance was typically measured automatically and the effect of human estimators’ sanity checks was neglected. Thus, this paper proposes the visualization of high-dimensional software project portfolio data using multidimensional scaling (MDS). We (i) propose data preparation steps for an MDS visualization of software portfolio data, (ii) visualize several real-world industry project portfolio data sets and quantify the achieved approximation quality to assess the feasibility, and (iii) outline the expected benefits referring to the visualized portfolios’ properties. This approach offers several promising benefits by enhancing portfolio data understanding and by providing intuitive means for estimators to assess an estimate’s plausibility.