Software Cost Estimator – Finally a true Profession!

by Harold van Heeringen – IDC/Metri, Netherlands

For many years, software development projects have failed to meet expectations, exceeding budgets, and overrunning schedules. Almost daily, these failing projects are headlined in the papers, especially when these are government projects, and taxpayers’ money is wasted on them.

Often, a lot of reasons are cited as the cause for these failures, ranging from simple bad luck to bad requirements management or scope creep. While these reasons are often legitimate, the cause is often bad estimation practices. Human judgement methods that result in an overly optimistic estimate, budget and schedule result in optimistic expectations that never were realistic in the first place. Unfortunately, this problem is not solved with an agile way of working, where budgets are often fixed and functionality delivered is faster, but also often unpredictable.

Recognizing this problem in the IT industry, not-for-profit organization Nesma, maintaining one of the three main ISO standards for functional size measurement and the International Cost Estimation and Analysis Association (ICEAA) developed the Cost Estimation Body of Knowledge for Software (CEBoK-S) and an associated certification program, which has been released early 2023. In ICEAA, a separate Special Interest Group for Software has been established, which will promote the CEBoK-S and the certification globally to improve the cost estimation capabilities in the software industry.

The author has been working on behalf of Nesma with ICEAA and is on the board of the SIG on behalf of Nesma and ISBSG.

In this presentation I’ll address the main issues in the industry and the way CEBoK-S is structured and aimed to solve these issues. I’ll demonstrate how to use ISBSG data to estimate software projects using functional size and relevant historic data.

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