Capability-Based Software Cost Estimation: Proposing a New Method to Estimate Software Costs
by Anandi Hira– CMU/SEI
The software cost estimation community struggles to build reliable, evidence-based cost estimates due to the absence of complete, fully specified requirements.
Institutions are engaged in research to overcome these challenges. by developing methods that support capability-based cost estimation and tracking for software intensive projects.
Capability-Based Planning has been used in business and acquisition environments to make high-level, testable objectives to identify gaps in existing capability or success criteria.
In the first part of the presentation, I will describe the results of a literature review to describe capabilities and capability-based planning. I then translate the existing definitions and methodologies for software. Finally, I will talk about the challenges in software cost estimation and how capability-based cost estimation models for software differ throughout the life cycle. I conclude with a summary methodology to develop a capability-based cost estimation for software, which is to define capability groups with similar software functions and associated effort ranges.
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About Anandi Hira
Anandi is a researcher at the Software Engineering Institute | Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Software Engineering with 9 years experience managing Unified Code Count (UCC), a code-metrics tool developed by USC Masters level students. Her experience with UCC demonstrates her ability to be a product manager (assign projects per priority of defects and requests, lead integration and testing efforts in preparation for releases, etc.), collect data and perform empirical research, and use the results to improve processes. Her research areas are cost and effort estimation, process improvement, and software metrics.
