Software effort estimation: Planning XP guidelines compared to research on traditional software development

Abstract

In the “Planning Extreme Programming” framework by Beck and Fowler, they propose several guidelines for project estimation. This paper focuses on the guideline to use estimation teams. There exist several methods from software engineering research on how to do this, with varying degree of formalism involved. We present an account of earlier research on how to combine expert estimates, and compare it with the XP guidelines. It seems that the proposed framework, with some modifications, is a reasonable way to improve accuracy.