Implementing Software Effort Estimation in a Medium-sized Company

Effort estimation in software development projects is far from being an easy task. In fact, despite the several effort estimation techniques available in the literature and the need for companies to perform such task in a daily basis, most small and medium-sized companies still suffer from the problem of incorrect estimations that often result in losing the contract bid or in failure during project execution. In this paper we present and discuss the implementation of a software effort estimation process in a medium-sized company, currently recognized as CMMI Level 5. The paper contextualizes the problem and the company, introduces the estimation techniques used, and presents some preliminary results, showing that software effort estimation can be successfully applied in medium-sized companies at low cost, allowing the reduction of project uncertainty and increasing the probability of success during bidding and execution.