One of the major activities in effective and efficient production of software projects is the precise estimation of software development effort. Estimation of the effort in primary steps of software development is one of the most important challenges in managing software projects. Some reasons for these challenges such as: discordant software projects, the complexity of the manufacturing proces...

An effective method for finding the relevant number (window size) and the elapsed time (window age) of recently completed projects has proven elusive in software effort estimation. Although these two parameters significantly affect the prediction accuracy, there is no effective method to stratify and sample chronological projects to improve prediction performance of software effort estimation m...

Effective coordination is an important factor in successful software projects that has not been fully explored in the context of agile software development. Agile software development projects eschew many traditional practices for achieving coordination leaving a gap in our understanding of exactly how such projects are coordinated and if this coordination is effective. However, before investig...

Code repositories on the Internet provide a tremendous amount of freely available open source code that can be reused for building new software. It has been argued that only software reuse can bring the gain of productivity in software construction demanded by the market. However, knowledge about the extent of reuse in software projects is only sparse. To remedy this, we report on an empirical ...

Defining software requirements is a difficult and complex process. It is best characterised as a joint learning process in which shared understandings evolve through dynamic interactions between clients and developers. The inherent difficulties in this complex process are exacerbated in outsourced software development projects. In this paper we review the use of Software Development Impact Stat...

Effort estimation is a long faced problem, but, in spite of the amount of research spent in this field, it still remains an open issue in the software engineering community. This is true especially in the case of renewal of legacy systems, where the current and well established approaches also fail. This paper presents an application of the method named Dynamic Calibration for effort estimation...

During the last few years, thousands of volunteers have created a large body of free software. Even though this accomplishment shows that the free software development model works, there are some drawbacks associated with this model. Due to the volunteer nature of most free software projects, it is impossible to fully rely on participants. Volunteers may become busy and neglect their duties. Th...

This paper describes the application of Problem-based learning (PBL) to the design and implementation of an Ecommerce web site by small groups of software engineering students. This work is part of a real-world software engineering course, taught to pre-internship students. The use of PBL has gained significant interest since its inception in the late 1950’s, and its later adaptation to small t...

The Software Engineering community has been trying to get fast and accurate software estimations for many years. Most of the proposed methods require historical information and/or experts’ judgment. Because of that, the current methods are not suitable for novice developers or persons who do not know the company development capability. In order to help overcome such need, this paper proposes a ...