An experience factory to improve software development effort estimates

Abstract

It is well known that effort estimate is an important issue for software project management. Software development effort can be obtained from the size of the software and the productivity of its development process. Nowadays the Function Point Analysis stands out as an approach largely used for software size estimate, while productivity values are extracted from international historical databases. Some databases show the median value of various productivity projects while others present all data according to some specific characterization of the projects. We argue that defining a framework of characteristics that impact on software project productivity can improve comparison between finished projects and the new ones that need an effort estimate. This article presents an approach to effort estimate with continuous improvement of the estimates using some characterization of the projects. Continuous improvement is based on the use of an experience factory. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.