Internal and External Software Benchmark Repository Utilization for Effort Estimation

Data repositories play critical role in software management practices. Construction of the estimation models, benchmark of software performance indicators, identification of the process improvement opportunities, and quality assessment are major utilization areas of software repositories. This paper presents the observed difficulties in utilization of external and multi-organizational software benchmark repositories for effort estimation model construction for a software organization in finance domain. ISBSG, Albrecht, China, Desharnais, Finnish, Maxwell and Kemerer repositories´ data were utilized in this study. The approach was the utilization of these repositories and organization´s own repository to estimate the software development effort and evaluate whether external and multi-organizational data be used for effort estimation.