Software Estimation & Measurement Issues

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The research hypothesis is the following: the software development process shares some characteristics with traditional engineering production processes implemented in the manufacturing of high technology products. For example, performance can vary across ranges of outputs: it may display economies of scale within some range, and it may display diseconomies of scale across other ranges of outputs. To overcome such diseconomies of scale within some range of a specific manufacturing design, production engineers design another production process with a larger capability to handle larger volumes of outputs. To investigate empirically the proposed theory and related hypotheses for software estimation purposes, requires an access to a large set of software projects for which not only specific variables must be available, but as well information about the projects size classification specific to each organization. Statistical studies will be carried on with data from two large repositories of software projects. Once research insights obtained on the presence-absence of economies-diseconomies of scale, we will revisit causal factors and related productivity impacts across size ranges, project scope and across organizations. Research will be conducted for estimation for pre-project, in-project and post-project contexts.