Determining the Factors Affecting the Accuracy of Effort Estimates for Different Application and Task Types

An important asset in the skill set of any software project manager is the ability to somewhat accurately estimate the effort required to develop a software application. Acquiring this asset, however, requires a thorough understanding of the factors that may affect the accuracy of these estimates. This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted to determine the causes of variation in the accuracy of effort estimations for different application and task types. A Pakistani software house that specializes in developing financial transaction processing applications is chosen for this empirical study. Actual and estimated values for software development effort are gathered and analyzed for four different types of applications - web-based, database, parallel processing, and telephony - each having six different types of tasks i.e. business-development, new features, usability, security, support, and performance. Over 1000 data points are considered. Analysis of the results reveals, for instance, that the effort for web-based applications is mostly underestimated while the effort for telephony applications is mostly overestimated. The underestimation in web-based applications is usually due to a failure to account for the learning curve associated with rapidly changing web technologies while the overestimation in telephony applications is usually due to a failure to account for the usage of third-party components.