A Double-Weighted Parametric Model for Academic Software Project Effort Estimation

Abstract

The effort, cost, and time play a vital role in the success or failure of the software. The ratio of software project failure nowadays is growing like a storm in the world. One of the reasons behind this failure proportion is an imprecise and inappropriate estimate of required effort, cost, and budget for particular software project development. The motivation behind our research is to estimate the effort for software development accurately. Accurately estimate effort for software development is one of the most challenging tasks because from a very early stage it requires in-depth study as well as detailed statistics. Participation of members of the team is important during the development of the project along with various activities like domain area, sector, nature, software process methodology, and other resources. All these proofs do not appear in the initial phase of development, but on the other side, they discovered as software growth progresses. Many models proposed for estimating effort related to software development, but only a few are adaptable for effort estimation task in the academic software project. From the study of nearly 600 academic software projects and inputs from more than 30 Software Engineering experts, this research paper proposes an innovative model based on 8 parameters and 24 sub-parameters. Each of the sub-parameters is weighted twice, and the final effort estimation obtained by summation of the individual product of the weight of the parameter and weight of sub-parameter. We have coined the term “ASPEE units” (Academic Software Project Effort Estimation) for the estimated effort.