Paper Info
Title
A Current Assessment of Software Development Effort Estimation
Abstract
In most cases, software projects exceed their estimated effort. It is often assumed that inaccurate estimates are the main reason for these overruns. Contrarily, our results show that this assumption is not reasonable in many cases. We conducted a survey to gather data on the current situation of software development effort estimation. Apart from objective criteria, we also asked the participants for their subjective perceptions of the estimates. The participants' perceptions indicate that they do not agree with the objective assessments as 82% perceive their estimate as 'good' despite large overruns and provide reasonable arguments for their perceptions. Furthermore, many projects do not re-estimate the effort due to change requests leading to meaningless comparisons of estimated and actual effort. As a consequence, research needs to find new measures to assess the actual estimation accuracy. Besides the actual estimation process, professionals need to intensify their effort to manage the estimation processes' surroundings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/ESEM.2011.32
ESEM
Keywords
Field
DocType
objective criterion,software project,actual estimation process,actual estimation accuracy,software development effort estimation,actual effort,objective assessment,estimated effort,reasonable argument,estimation process,current assessment,programming,accuracy,software measurement,questionnaire survey,estimation,software development
Data mining,Analysis effort method,Personal software process,Software quality analyst,Systems engineering,Computer science,Software project management,Software development effort estimation,Software metric,Team software process,Use Case Points
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1938-6451
9
0.61
References 
Authors
22
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dirk Basten15716.67
Werner Mellis215317.29