Pioneers of Parametrics

This paper provides a historical account of the development of the field of parametrics through information obtained during interviews of twelve pioneers of the field. Cost model developers, users, and practitioners were interviewed with the intent to capture their views on the impact between cost estimation research and practice. The individuals interviewed represent a diverse range of perspectives including academia, government, and industry. Each perspective sheds light on the areas in which the field of parametrics has had an impact and which synergies have been influential in the development of the field. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of the future challenges for the field of parametrics

Efficient Indicators to Evaluate the Status of Software Development Effort Estimation inside the Organizations

Development effort is an undeniable part of the project management which considerably influences the success of project. Inaccurate and unreliable estimation of effort can easily lead to the failure of project. Due to the special specifications, accurate estimation of effort in the software projects is a vital management activity that must be carefully done to avoid from the unforeseen results. However numerous effort estimation methods have been proposed in this field, the accuracy of estimates is not satisfying and the attempts continue to improve the performance of estimation methods. Prior researches conducted in this area have focused on numerical and quantitative approaches and there are a few research works that investigate the root problems and issues behind the inaccurate effort estimation of software development effort. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate and investigate the situation of an organization in terms of effort estimation. The proposed framework includes various indicators which cover the critical issues in field of software development effort estimation. Since the capabilities and shortages of organizations for effort estimation are not the same, the proposed indicators can lead to have a systematic approach in which the strengths and weaknesses of organizations in field of effort estimation are discovered.Comment: 10 page

Identifying Effort Estimation Factors for Corrective Maintenance in Object-Oriented Systems

This research explores the decision-making process of expert estimators of corrective maintenance projects by usingqualitative methods to identify the factors that they use in deriving estimates. We implement a technique called causalmapping, which allows us to identify the cognitive links between the information that estimators use, and the estimates thatthey produce based on that information. Results suggest that a total of 17 factors may be relevant for corrective maintenanceeffort estimation, covering constructs related to developers, code, defects, and environment. This line of research aims ataddressing the limitations of existing maintenance estimation models that do not incorporate a number of soft factors, thus,achieving less accurate estimates than human experts

Who is the Real Hero? Measuring Developer Contribution via Multi-dimensional Data Integration

Proper incentives are important for motivating developers in open-source communities, which is crucial for maintaining the development of open-source software healthy. To provide such incentives, an accurate and objective developer contribution measurement method is needed. However, existing methods rely heavily on manual peer review, lacking objectivity and transparency. The metrics of some automated works about effort estimation use only syntax-level or even text-level information, such as changed lines of code, which lack robustness. Furthermore, some works about identifying core developers provide only a qualitative understanding without a quantitative score or have some project-specific parameters, which makes them not practical in real-world projects. To this end, we propose CValue, a multidimensional information fusion-based approach to measure developer contributions. CValue extracts both syntax and semantic information from the source code changes in four dimensions: modification amount, understandability, inter-function and intra-function impact of modification. It fuses the information to produce the contribution score for each of the commits in the projects. Experimental results show that CValue outperforms other approaches by 19.59% on 10 real-world projects with manually labeled ground truth. We validated and proved that the performance of CValue, which takes 83.39 seconds per commit, is acceptable to be applied in real-world projects. Furthermore, we performed a large-scale experiment on 174 projects and detected 2,282 developers having inflated commits. Of these, 2,050 developers did not make any syntax contribution; and 103 were identified as bots

Analyzing Cost Estimation Model to Optimize COCOMO II for Enterprise Level Software

The stimulus to carry out this research is to find out the best ERP cost estimation model while implementing ERP in the context of Pakistan. For this purpose study has utilized qualitative and quantitative approach. Initially the comparison of existing several cost estimation model has been done through literature review. On the basis of substantive literature review, one ERP cost estimation mode has been chosen i.e. COCOMO. In second phase, in order to validate this model in the context of Pakistan, the study has adapted a questionnaire from relevant study and survey has been done of the IT companies operating in Pakistan which are also involved in ERP implementation. Sample has been collected from 27 companies and data analysis is done in a statistical software (SPSS). On the basis of results obtained from the SPSS and with the support of literature findings has been extracted. Findings indicate that COCOMO II is the best model to estimate the ERP implementation cost in the context of Pakistan. Moreover it is recommended to validate his model in the other countries. Findings would be beneficial for the future studies and contributes in the knowledge of scientific community. Moreover, results of this study can be helpful for other companies in Pakistan who are involved in ERP implementation process and looking for best model to estimate cost of ERP implementation

Open Hybrid Model: A New Ensemble Model for Software Development Cost Estimation

Given various features of a software project, it may face different administrative challenges requiring right decisions by software project managers. A major challenge is to estimate software development cost for which different methods have been proposed by many researchers. According to the literature, the capability of a proposed model or method is demonstrated in a specific set of software projects. Hence, the aim of this study is to present a model to take advantage of the capabilities of various software development cost estimation models and methods simultaneously. For this purpose, a new model called "open hybrid model" was proposed based on the firefly algorithm. The proposed model includes an extensible bank of estimation methods. The model also includes an extensible bank of rules to describe the relation between existing methods. Considering project conditions, the proposed model tries to find the best rule for combining estimation methods in the methods bank. Three datasets of real projects were used to evaluate the precision of the proposed model, and the results were compared with those of other 11 methods. The results were compared based on performance parmeters widely used to show the accuracy and stability of estimation models. According to the results, the open hybrid model was able to select the most appropriate methods present in the methods bank

Effort Estimation Factors for Corrective Software Maintenance Projects: A Qualitative Analysis of Estimation Criteria

In this paper, we identify factors that impact software maintenance effort by exploring expert software maintenance estimators’ knowledge about corrective maintenance projects. We use a qualitative approach to identify the issues important to these experts to derive their effort estimates. We find seventeen factors (rated and rank ordered by importance) that affect corrective maintenance effort and include constructs related to developers, code, defects, and environment. Several of these factors that have a comparably strong influence on corrective maintenance estimation are unique to corrective maintenance and are not generally observed in established software estimation models. The results enhance organizations’ ability to effectively manage maintenance environments by focusing attention on the identified areas. For future research, these results represent an important step toward developing a comprehensive and accurate corrective maintenance effort estimation model

A Survey on Software Cost Estimation Techniques

The ability to accurately estimate the cost needed to complete a specific project has been a challenge over the past decades. For a successful software project, accurate prediction of the cost, time and effort is a very much essential task. This paper presents a systematic review of different models used for software cost estimation which includes algorithmic methods, non-algorithmic methods and learning-oriented methods. The models considered in this review include both the traditional and the recent approaches for software cost estimation. The main objective of this paper is to provide an overview of software cost estimation models and summarize their strengths, weakness, accuracy, amount of data needed, and validation techniques used. Our findings show, in general, neural network based models outperforms other cost estimation techniques. However, no one technique fits every problem and we recommend practitioners to search for the model that best fit their needs