Efficient indicators to evaluate the status of software development effort estimation inside the organizations

Abstract

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.