An experiment on software project size and effort estimation

Expert judgment is still the dominant estimation technique in practice today for software project size and effort. In this paper, we evaluate two techniques that are frequently suggested as effective support for human estimators: checklists and group discussions. A student experiment was conducted to investigate how checklists and group discussions help estimators to improve their estimates. The results suggest that both checklists and group discussions significantly contribute to improved estimation, but in distinct and complementary ways.