It is well documented that the software industry suffers from frequent cost overruns. A contributing factor is, we believe, the imprecise estimation terminology in use. A lack of clarity and precision in the use of estimation terms reduces the interpretability of estimation accuracy results, makes the communication of estimates difficult, and lowers the learning possibilities. This paper report...

Discussions with software developers from a number of business organisations were targeted at the effect of estimation practices on the success or failure of some of the software development projects with which they had been involved. Several important estimation topics were also covered in a questionnaire. Our results show that for only one-third of the projects were the project managers invol...

In the software development process, effort distribution based on phase is an important but often a neglected aspect of software cost estimation. Insufficient phase effort distribution study is the primary reason of poor software effort estimation. This paper provides the results of an empirical study on phase effort distribution based on 2956 projects. The software development process is divid...

Expert-based estimation is the most common and preferred method to estimate the effort for software development project because it is fast, less expensive and reasonably accuracy. Expert software developers use his intuition and experience during effort estimation task. Estimation by analogy of features is also used to compare the new feature to similar in past development. This paper extends r...

Software effort estimation is an important process of system development life cycle, as it may affect the success of software projects if project designers estimate the projects inaccurately. In the past of few decades, various effort prediction models have been proposed by academicians and practitioners. Traditional estimation techniques include Lines of Codes (LOC), Function Point Analysis (F...

Cost overrun of software projects is major cause of their failures. In order to facilitate accurate software cost estimation, there are several metrics, tools and datasets. In this paper, we evaluate and compare different metrics and datasets in terms of similarities and differences of involved software attributes. These metrics forecast project cost estimations based on different software attr...

The four studies included in this paper examine the strength of the first impression in the estimation of work effort. The studied context is mainly one where the first impressions of software development effort is manipulated (biased) through comparisons with either much too low or too high reference effort values, e.g., by responding to a question from the client whether one believes that the...