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A survey on software cost estimation in the chinese software industry

Published: 09 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Although a lot of attention has been paid to software cost estimation since 1960, making accurate effort and schedule estimation is still a challenge. To collect evidence and identify potential areas of improvement in software cost estimation, it is important to investigate the estimation accuracy, the estimation method used, and the factors influencing the adoption of estimation methods in current industry. This paper analyzed 112 projects from the Chinese software project benchmarking dataset and conducted questionnaire survey on 116 organizations to investigate the above information. The paper presents the current situations related to software project estimation in China and provides evidence-based suggestions on how to improve software project estimation. Our survey results suggest, e.g., that large projects were more prone to cost and schedule overruns, that most computing managers and professionals were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with the project estimation, that very few organizations (15%) used model-based methods, and that the high adoption cost and insignificant benefit after adoption were the main causes for low use of model-based methods.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
October 2008
374 pages
ISBN:9781595939715
DOI:10.1145/1414004
  • General Chair:
  • Dieter Rombach,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Sebastian Elbaum,
  • Jürgen Münch
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Published: 09 October 2008

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  1. estimation method
  2. estimation model
  3. software cost estimation

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