On the Utility of Historical Project Statistics for Cost and Schedule Estimation: Results from a Simulation-based Case Study

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Abdel-Hamid, Tarek K.
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1990
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Science Direct
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Estimating the duration and cost of software projects has traditionally been, and continues to be, fraught with peril. This is in spite of the fact that over the last decade a large number of quantitative software estimation models have been developed. Our objective in this article is to challenge two fundamental assumptions that underlie research practices in the area of software estimation, which may be directly contributing to the industry's poor track record to date. Both concern the"fitness" of raw historical project statistics for calibrating and evaluating (new) estimation models. A system dynamics model of the software development process is developed and used as the experimentation vehicle for this study. An overview of the model's structure is presented, followed by a discussion of the two experiments conducted and their results. In the first, we demonstrate why it is inadequate to assess the accuracy of (new) estimation tools simply on the basis of how accurately they replicate old projects. Second, we show why raw historical project results do not necessarily constitute the most "preferred" and reliable benchmark for future estimation.
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The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/0164-1212(90)90035-K
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https://hdl.handle.net/10945/68470
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Abdel-Hamid, Tarek K. "On the utility of historical project statistics for cost and schedule estimation: results from a simulation-based case study."�Journal of Systems and Software�13.1 (1990): 71-82.
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.
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