Improving software effort estimation with human-centric models
Rui Alves, Pedro D. Valente, Nuno Nunes · 2013
Bringing human-centric models into the software development lifecycle provides unique opportunities to enhance development practice. Modeling the interactive aspects of a software system ensures a better understanding of user requirements leading to improved user interface and general usage and acceptance of the system. It also provides a unique opportunity to enhance conventional software development practices, such as effort estimation, which is known to have major deviations. In this paper we illustrate this mutual benefit presenting a statistical analysis of the effort estimation for seven real world software development projects. We contrast a conventional use-case points (UCP) method with iUCP an HCI enhanced method Here we propose an enhancement of the iUCP original effort estimation formula. This results in an improved mean deviation of iUCP over UCP supporting the claim that reflecting HCI concerns into internal SE artifacts generates more accurate estimations of software development effort. Our results provide additional evidence of the benefits of using human-centric models to enhance the software development practice, in particular for long lasting challenges like generating accurate project estimates early in the development lifecycle.