Applying Software Effort Estimation Model Based on Work Breakdown Structure

Software effort estimation is an important activity for effective project management. To support the prediction of efforts in the early stage of a software project development, we propose an effort estimation model along with a software effort estimation process to estimate project efforts from high level WBS. The proposed estimation model is composed of four original task assignment factors - team size, concurrency, intensity, and fragmentation and one newly proposed factor, named WBS effort. To demonstrate the feasibility of proposed model, a case study is presented. The result of the case study shows that comparing the proposed model with those that using original task assignment effort estimation model, the accuracy of the prediction is improved by applying the five factors. For the data examined, the proposed model also shows to have better results in goodness of fit and quality of estimation than original one.