Assessing and Interpreting The Accuracy of Effort Estimates
The most common measure of the average estimation accuracy is the MMRE (Mean Magnitude of Relative Error), where the MRE of each estimate is defined as:
MRE =
This measure has been criticized and there are several alternative measures, such as more symmetric measures, Weighted Mean of Quartiles of relative errors (WMQ) and Mean Variation from Estimate (MVFE).
A high estimation error cannot automatically be interpreted as an indicator of low estimation ability. Alternative, competing or complementing, reasons include low cost control of project, high complexity of development work, and more delivered functionality than originally estimated. A framework for improved use and interpretation of estimation error measurement is included in.
Read more about this topic: Software Development Effort Estimation
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