Effort estimation in incremental software development

Abstract

Incremental software development offers many benefits compared with more traditional development approaches. Indeed, incremental approaches have been utilised for many years due to the involvement of users, the early demonstration of capability and the potential for risk reduction that they offer. However, there appears to have been little work on modelling, planning and controlling incremental development. The paper attempts to introduce a quantitative analytical framework for evaluating such approaches and their impacts on the development effort. Models that predict development effort as an exponential function of product size are used in the paper to explore some of the relationships between effort and the number of increments, thereby providing new insights into the economic impact of incremental approaches to software project

Productivity trends in incremental and iterative software development

“…This approach allows them to gain enough knowledge and experience with the production in order to move on to the next increment which they will face something a little more challenging. This process model also ensures early realization of business values as well as other project requirements with quick deliveries for users and clients to react upon [5,13]. However, as the user base grows, there is more concern with reliability, which is hard to retrofit into an easiestfirst code base.…”

“…Based on Boehm's discussion about estimate for incremental development, Benediktsson and Dalcher conducted a series of studies [4][5][6] estimating IID production effort and size using expanded calculations derived from Basic COCOMO [21] and COCOMOII [20]. In their reports, they noted that relative productivity, which is the productivity for IID, is inversely proportional to the scale factor exponents-meaning if a project is developed under single increment setting and it is thought to be productive, but it may not be the case if the same project is developed with IID.…”

An Effort Estimation Taxonomy for Agile Software Development

“…Product size: Development e®ort, in general, is strongly correlated with product size. Many research e®orts have been made to empirically relate e®ort with product size [26]. This facet documents whether the agile team uses size as a predictor and which metric is used to represent the size.…”

Evolving Software Effort Estimation Models Using Multigene Symbolic Regression Genetic Programming

“…Three types of COCOMO models are presented. They are: Organic, Semidetached and Embedded models [27]. …”