Parametric software effort estimation models consisting on a single mathematical relationship suffer from poor adjustment and predictive characteristics in cases in which the historical database considered contains data coming from projects of a heterogeneous nature. The segmentation of the input domain according to clusters obtained from the database of historical projects serves as a tool for...

Change effort estimation (CEE) is the process of predicting the work and the hours needed when there is a software change request. Software changes that are not correctly addressed, not complete and not consistent with other artefacts will introduce delay to the project and exceed the original budget. Requirement changes during software development phase are delicate to handle due to the fact t...

Software effort estimation is a critical part of software engineering. Although many techniques and algorithmic models have been developed and implemented by practitioners, accurate software effort prediction is still a challenging endeavor. In order to address this issue, a novel soft computing framework was previously developed. Our study utilizes this novel framework to develop an approach c...

Both Agile Software Development (ASD) and Global Software Development (GSD) are 21 century trends in the software industry. Many studies are reported in the literature wherein software companies have applied an agile method or practice GSD. Given that effort estimation plays a remarkable role in software project management, how do companies perform effort estimation when they use agile method i...

Software metrics are currently used in the industry mainly for cost and effort estimation, while some research suggested their use as fault indicators. There are very few empirical studies in software measurement, especially in the realm of object-oriented metrics. There is no record of management system assessment using software metrics. In this paper we discuss the use of the established obje...

Existing algorithmic models fail to produce accurate software development effort estimates. To address this problem, a case-based reasoning model, called Estor, was developed based on the verbal protocols of a human expert solving a set of estimation problems. Estor was then presented with 15 software effort estimation tasks. The estimates of Estor were compared to those of the expert as well a...

To date many software engineering cost models have been developed to predict the cost, schedule and quality of the software under development. But, the rapidly changing nature of software development has made it extremely difficult to develop empirical models that continue to yield high prediction accuracies. Software development costs continue to increase and practitioners continually express ...

Software projects mostly exceeds budget, delivered late and does not meet with the customer’s satisfaction for years. In the past, many traditional development models like waterfall, spiral, iterative, and prototyping methods are used to build the software systems. In recent years, agile models are widely used in developing the software products. The major reasons are – simplicity, incorporatin...

-In software industry Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) is considered to be the most widely used model for effort estimation. Cost drivers have significant influence on the COCOMO and this research investigates the role of cost drivers in improving the precision of effort estimation. It is important to stress that uncertainty at the input level of the COCOMO yields uncertainty at the output, whi...

This paper examines how a team of software professionals goes about estimating the effort of a software project using a judgment-based, bottom-up estimation approach. By employing a social practice perspective that highlights the distributed character of expertise and conceives actions as mediated by cultural tools, the paper analyzes the interactional process through which the estimation tasks...