State of the practice in software effort estimation: A survey and literature review

Effort estimation is a key factor for software project success, defined as delivering software of agreed quality and functionality within schedule and budget. Traditionally, effort estimation has been used for planning and tracking project resources. Effort estimation methods founded on those goals typically focus on providing exact estimates and usually do not support objectives that have recently become important within the software industry, such as systematic and reliable analysis of causal effort dependencies. This article presents the results of a study of software effort estimation from an industrial perspective. The study surveys industrial objectives, the abilities of software organizations to apply certain estimation methods, and actually applied practices of software effort estimation. Finally, requirements for effort estimation methods identified in the survey are compared against existing estimation methods

Distances between Requirements Engineering and Later Software Development Activities: A Systematic Map

[Context and Motivation] The main role of requirements engineering (RE) is to guide development projects towards implementing products that will appeal to customers. To effectively achieve this RE needs to be coordinated with and clearly communicated to the later software development activities. [Question/Problem] Communication gaps between RE and other development activities reduce coordination and alignment, and can lead to project delays and failure to meet customer needs. [Principle ideas/results] The main hypothesis is that coordination is enhanced by proximity to RE roles and artefacts, and that distances to later activities increase the effort needed to align requirements with other development work. Thirteen RE-related distances have been identified through a systematic map of existing research. [Contribution] Reported dis-tances are mapped according to research type, RE activity and later software development activities. The results provide an overview of RE distances and can be used a basis for defining a theoretical framework