DOI 10.2298/CSIS110316068P A Comparative Evaluation of Effort Estimation Methods in the Software Life Cycle

Abstract. Even though there are a number of software size and effort measurement methods proposed in literature, they are not widely adopted in the practice. According to literature, only 30 % of software companies use measurement, mostly as a method for additional validation. In order to determine whether the objective metric approach can give results of the same quality or better than the estimates relying on work breakdown and expert judgment, we have validated several standard functional measurement and analysis methods (IFPUG, NESMA, Mark II, COSMIC, and use case points), on the selected set of small and medium size real-world web based projects at CMMI level 2. Evaluation performed in this paper provides objective justification and guidance for the use of a measurement-based estimation in these kinds of projects