History
Software researchers and practitioners have been addressing the problems of effort estimation for software development projects since at least the 1960s; see, e.g., work by Farr and Nelson.
Most of the research has focused on the construction of formal software effort estimation models. The early models were typically based on regression analysis or mathematically derived from theories from other domains. Since then a high number of model building approaches have been evaluated, such as approaches founded on case-based reasoning, classification and regression trees, simulation, neural networks, Bayesian statistics, lexical analysis of requirement specifications, genetic programming, linear programming, economic production models, soft computing, fuzzy logic modeling, statistical bootstrapping, and combinations of two or more of these models. The perhaps most common estimation products today, e.g., the formal estimation models COCOMO and SLIM have their basis in estimation research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. The estimation approaches based on functionality-based size measures, e.g., function points, is also based on research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, but are re-appearing with modified size measures under different labels, such as “use case points” in the 1990s and COSMIC in the 2000s.
Read more about this topic: Software Development Effort Estimation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)