There are numerous forecast models of software development costs, however, various problems become apparent in context to practical application. Standardized methods, such as COCOMO II have to be calibrated at an individual operational level on the basis of the underlying database. This paper presents a new activity based approach that is based on business specific cost data that can be easily ...

Performance of software projects can be improved by providing predictions of various project characteristics. The predictions warn managers with information about potential problems and provide them with the possibility to prevent or avoid problems. Large software projects are characterized by a large number of factors that impact the project performance, which makes predicting project characte...

complex project will likely fail without a plan. For an architect who wants to build a skyscraper, that plan is a blueprint. For a software developer who wants to satisfy customers’ needs, that plan is a complete, consistent, and correct expression of the stakeholders’ requirements. We must understand a problem before we can express the requirements for a correct solution. Otherwise, we will de...

In today’s highIy competitive and constantly growing market for software products, planning and scheduling of large software projects has become a bottleneck to increasing production productivity [1331. This work is to investigate the mechanisms required to support software project planning and scheduling (SPPS). Our approach is to 1. define SPPS as a reactive pmcess that involvw human negotiat...

Predicting software defects has been one of the most demanding tasks for software engineering researchers and practitioners. The work in this area resulted in producing various defect prediction models. Their common weakness is that they typically treat all defects equally. However, software companies need to categorize defects found in their products to estimate user satisfaction and to priori...

This paper is based on the premise that people’s behavioural competencies or characteristics of professional conduct influence the effectiveness and efficiency with which they perform a predetermined role in the software process. We propose a capabilities-oriented process model that includes traditional elements of the software process (activities, products, techniques, people and roles) and th...

Prior work has shown that extremely small code patterns, such as the conditional operator and implicit type conversion, can cause considerable misunderstanding in programmers. Until now, the real world impact of these patterns ś known as ‘atoms of confusion’ ś was only speculative. This work uses a corpus of 14 of the most popular and inluential open source C and C++ projects to measure the pre...

For the last six years, students in the Software Engineering Project course at the University of Tasmania have undertaken projects in teams of four or five members. Since 1998 peer testing sessions have been conducted in two different formats: paired peer code reviews and group peer inspections. The critique that the testers perform can help the development team to identify problems before asse...

Over the last twenty five years, software development projects have increasingly been plagued by schedule and cost overruns, while product quality is often poor. The term "software crisis" has been coined to highlight this situation. The lack of adequate methods and tools to support software development, and of techniques to simplify project management tasks have been identified as major factor...