Effort estimation for corrective software maintenance
Andrea De Lucia, Eugenio Pompella, Silvio Stefanucci · 2002
This paper reports on an empirical study aiming at constructing cost estimation models for corrective maintenance projects. Data available were collected from five maintenance projects currently carried out by a large software enterprise. The resulting models, constructed using multivariate linear regression techniques, allow to estimate the costs of a project conducted according to the adopted maintenance processes. Model performances on future observations were achieved by taking into account different corrective maintenance task typologies, each affecting the effort in a different way, and assessed by means of a cross validation which guarantees a nearly unbiased estimate of the prediction error. The constructed models are currently adopted by the subject company.