Jerry Smith is the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of a global consulting and training company that specializes in object-oriented technology. He has specialized in software development, objectoriented technology, and management for over 15 years. He is the principle scientist for a long-term, multiproject research effort focusing on the best-practice techniques used to transfer and retain inform...

With increasing expenses for future HPC centers, the need to look at their productivity, defined as amount of science per total cost of ownership (TCO), grows. This includes development costs which arise from development effort spent to parallelize, tune or port an application to a certain architecture. Development effort estimation is popular in software engineering, but cannot be applied dire...

Expert judgement is still the dominant technique in practice today for estimation of software project size and effort. In this paper, two instruments are evaluated that have been frequently suggested as effective support for human estimators: checklists and group discussions. A student experiment has been conducted to investigate how checklists and group discussions help estimators to improve t...

—Traditional cost estimation models in software engineering are based on the concept of productivity defined as the ratio of output to input; for instance, detailed software estimation models, such as COCOMO, can take multiple factors into account, but their multipliers lead to a single perspective based on the productivity concept. A less explored relationship in software engineering is the on...

Cost estimation process becomes a crucial factor in any software development project. An effective software estimate provides the information needed to design a workable software development plan. An effective software estimate provides important information for making project decisions, projecting performance and defining objectives and plans. Without the proper guidance in a project, the resu...

Software cost estimation is a key open issue for the software industry, which suffers from cost overruns frequently. As the most popular technique for object-oriented software cost estimation is Use Case Points (UCP) method, however, it has two major drawbacks: the uncertainty of the cost factors and the abrupt classification. To address these two issues, refined the use case complexity classif...

Culture and leadership factors play an important role in software development and cost estimation. We discuss the many dimensions of culture and leadership and their impact on cost estimation in software development. We conducted a survey to identify leadership and cultural factors that may influence the software development process and its associated cost. A cost estimation model incorporating...

Calibration, has been .found to be difficult in practice. Wide experience in using the estimation model is necessary; experience which the beginner naturally lacks. This paper indicates why it is important to calibrate a model and how the inexperienced user can be helped by an expert system. In addition, the development of, and experience with, the prototype of an expert system are described. T...