An empirical study using task assignment patterns to improve the accuracy of software effort estimation

Abstract

In most software development organizations, there is seldom a one-to-one mapping between software developers and development tasks. It is frequently necessary to concurrently assign individuals to multiple tasks, and to assign more than one individual to work cooperatively on a single task. A principal goal in making such assignments should be to minimize the effort required to complete each task. But what impact does the manner in which developers are assigned to tasks have on the effort requirements? This paper identifies four task assignment factors: team size, concurrency, intensity and fragmentation. These four factors are shown to improve the predictive ability of the well-known Intermediate COCOMO cost estimation model. A parsimonious effort estimation model is also derived that utilizes a subset of the task assignment factors and Unadjusted Function Points. For the data examined, this parsimonious model is shown to have goodness of fit and quality of estimation superior to that of the COCOMO model, while utilizing fewer cost factors.

Organizational Strategies and Social Interaction Influence in Software Development Effort Estimation

“…Also capabilities of the team members in terms of project complexity and risk factors to be measured. After that we can focus on estimating the total cost of the product and as a result we can schedule the product [2,[4][5][6][7].…”

“…With high objective the organizations may establish the service level agreements for resolving issues. The targets pertain to factors that will measure the effectiveness of the system [6].…”

“…Quantifies functionality provided to the user based primarily on logical design. Measure software development and maintenance independently of technology used for implementation [6]. …”

“…This often results in clients needing to throw away some of the critical core capabilities of the product, thus losing some of the expected benefits they had hoped for from the completed project. The reality is that the team may actually have enough resources to deliver all of the initial requirements prior to the re-scoping of the project [6,7].…”

Stakeholders' social interaction in requirements engineering of open source software

“…First, hybrid estimation method exists [153]. Second, while the majority of studies confirmed the effect of group size on software development effort, Smith et al [174] showed the effect was not always statistically significant. Finally, optimality does not mean sticking to the same group size over the entire project lifespan.…”