A Proposal of Effort Estimation Method for Information Mining Projects Oriented to SMEs

Software projects need to predict the cost and effort with its associated quantity of resources at the beginning of every project. Information Mining projects are not an exception to this requirement, particularly when they are required by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). An existing Information Mining projects estimation method is not reliable for small-sized projects because it tends to overestimates the estimated efforts. Therefore, considering the characteristics of these projects developed with the CRISP-DM methodology, an estimation method oriented to SMEs is proposed in this paper. First, the main features of SMEs’ projects are described and applied as cost drivers of the new method with the corresponding formula. Then this is validated by comparing its results to the existing estimation method using SMEs real projects. As a result, it can be seen that the proposed method produces a more accurate estimation than the existing estimation method for small-sized projects.