Effort Estimation in Global Software Development Projects: Preliminary Results from a Survey

Global Software Development (GSD) has intensified over the past years. Many reasons drove this development practice rise, where reducing development costs can be highlighted. In this context, software development effort estimation plays a very important role to achieve this goal of reducing costs. Once the effort required to develop software is a key component of the cost of development, the correct application of effort estimation techniques is crucial for the success of these projects. However, the current set of effort estimation techniques and models have been used without a clear definition of what has to be different when such techniques or models are used in the context of GSD projects. This paper presents preliminary results towards the understanding of effort estimation in GSD projects. The results found indicate that the teams don´t have clear criteria to guide the selection of an effort estimation technique for a certain project. In addition, we can not correlate the effort estimation technique being used and the number of locations involved in a distributed project.