An empirical study using task assignment patterns to improve theaccuracy of software effort estimation

摘要

In most software development organizations, there is seldom anone-to-one mapping between software developers and development tasks. Itnis frequently necessary to concurrently assign individuals to multiplentasks and to assign more than one individual to work cooperatively on ansingle task. A principal goal in making such assignments should be tonminimize the effort required to complete each task. But what impact doesnthe manner in which developers are assigned to tasks have on the effortnrequirements? This paper identifies four task assignment factors: teamnsize, concurrency, intensity, and fragmentation. These four factors arenshown to improve the predictive ability of the well-known intermediatenCOCOMO cost estimation model. A parsimonious effort estimation model isnalso derived that utilizes a subset of the task assignment factors andnunadjusted function points. For the data examined, this parsimoniousnmodel is shown to have goodness of fit and quality of estimationnsuperior to that of the COCOMO model, while utilizing fewer cost factors