Comparative Study of Project Effort Estimation Methods by using Public Domain Multi-organizational and Organization-specific Project Data

Over the past ten to fifteen years the use of software has increased exponentially. Software development became a critical process. Software products need to be developed within time and budget and, furthermore, to an agreed level of quality. Therefore, the development process has to be well planned, which includes estimates of time, effort and personnel requirements. In the software industry it is usual to produce a product each time rather than produce the same product again and again as in manufactory. Furthermore, the opportunities for developing software, e.g. tools and programming languages, become more and more various. This leads to difficulties in estimating the costs for a software project, because there is no general rule for how to derive an estimate in an environment of marked change. This research examines the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) repository, which is a large database of completed software projects from different organizations that can be used for estimating the required effort for ne