A New Software Estimating Framework: 25 Years and Thousands of Projects Later
Mike Ross · 2007
1,2Abstract—It’s about time we in the software development community revisit the assumptions, relationships, and flexi-bility contained in our currently-available software estimat-ing models. Most of the current models still implement fun-damental relationships that are based on 25 year old data and assumptions. In the meantime, data from many thou-sands of projects have since been collected and offer an opportunity to revisit old assumptions and relationships. This paper documents the basis, assumptions, and deriva-tions behind a set of general software effort, duration, and defects estimating relationships that are based on the notion that software construction is the application of effort (labor) over some duration (period of elapsed calendar time) that produces a desired software product (size) and unwanted byproducts (defects). This set of relationships is derived