Software Development Effort Estimation - History

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.