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Reducing estimation uncertainty with continuous assessment: tracking the "cone of uncertainty"

Published: 20 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Accurate software cost and schedule estimations are essential especially for large software projects. However, once the required efforts have been estimated, little is done to recalibrate and reduce the uncertainty of the initial estimates. To address this problem, we have developed and used a framework to continuously monitor the software project progress and readjust the estimated effort utilizing the Constructive Cost Model II (COCOMO II) and the Unified CodeCount Tool developed by the University of Southern California (USC). As a software project progresses, we gain more information about the project itself, which can then be used to assess and re-estimate the effort required to complete the project. With more accurate estimations and less uncertainties, the quality and goal of project outcome can be assured within the available resources. The paper thus also provides and analyzes empirical data on how projects evolve within the familiar software "cone of uncertainty".

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASE '10: Proceedings of the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
September 2010
534 pages
ISBN:9781450301169
DOI:10.1145/1858996
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 20 September 2010

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  1. cost estimation
  2. uncertainty

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  • (2020)User Story Driven Adaptive Planning Framework in Personal Daily Context2020 International Symposium on Community-centric Systems (CcS)10.1109/CcS49175.2020.9231325(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2020
  • (2019)Theoretical Foundations: Management—Information Systems—ComplexityTactical Management in Complexity10.1007/978-3-030-22804-0_3(65-134)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2019
  • (2017)Time Distribution of Software Stage Effort2017 24th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference Workshops (APSECW)10.1109/APSECW.2017.9(41-49)Online publication date: Dec-2017
  • (2014)Exploiting prior-phase effort data to estimate the effort for the subsequent phasesProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering10.1145/2639490.2639509(42-51)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2014
  • (2012)COTIPMOProceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Process10.5555/2664360.2664366(28-37)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2012
  • (2012)COTIPMO: A COnstructive Team Improvement Process MOdel2012 International Conference on Software and System Process (ICSSP)10.1109/ICSSP.2012.6225977(28-37)Online publication date: Jun-2012

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