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...

Effort estimation is the first of many steps in the software development process that can lead to a successful project’s completion. It is a complex task, that constitutes the basis for all subsequent steps related to planing and management. Effort estimation is also a very important part in agile software development projects. In order to achieve the highest possible levels of accuracy, softwa...

In software cost estimation various methods have been proposed to yield a prediction of the productivity of a software project. Most of the methods produce point estimates. However, in practice it is more realistic and useful to have a method providing interval predictions. Although some methods accompany a point estimate with a prediction interval, it is also reasonable to use a method predict...

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 ...

Introducing enterprise information systems (EIS) is usually associated with high costs. It is therefore crucial to understand those factors that determine or influence these costs. Though software cost estimation has received considerable attention during the last decades, it is difficult to apply existing approaches to EIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these methods...

A reliable and accurate similarity measurement between two software projects has always been a challenge for analogy-based software cost estimation. Since the effort for a new project is retrieved from similar historical projects, it is essentially to use the appropriate similarity measure that finds those close projects which in turn increases the estimation accuracy. In software engineering l...

Software cost estimation is the process of predicting the effort required to develop a software system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last 30 years. This paper provides a general overview of software cost estimation methods including the recent advances in the field. As a number of these models rely on a software size estimate as input, we first provide an overview of commo...

Software cost estimation based on multivariate data from completed projects requires the building of efficient models. These models essentially describe relations in the data, either on the basis of correlations between variables or of similarities between the projects. The continuous growth of the amount of data gathered and the need to perform preliminary analysis in order to discover pattern...

Introducing process-aware information systems (PAIS) in enterprises is usually associated with high costs. It is therefore crucial to understand those factors that determine these costs. Though software cost estimation has received considerable attention during the last decades, it is difficult to apply existing approaches to PAIS. This difficulty particularly stems from the inability of these ...