Improving Software Project Estimates Based on Historical Data

• Autor(a) principal: Bruno Filipe Salgado Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/89041
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

Due to the strong competition that exists in today's markets, it is essential for a company like Altran, to grow up further in order to be in front of both national and international level. For this to happen, it is necessary to make good estimates in order to contractually and control its projects, but sometimes in practice it isn't always easy due to several factors. Therefore the effort estimation of the projects becomes a crucial step, so that the client understands how much the project will cost, both in time and money .The estimates quality is decisive both to satisfy current customers and to attract new clients to accede to developed products by Altran. The current work resulted from a proposal made by Altran, which set very specific and ambitious challenges in order to grow up and improve the current methodology and assist project managers and respective teams. Although the current Altran's project estimation leads to very acceptable results, there are still some limitations and some gaps where it is necessary to intervene so that the quality standards at least remain high. After analyzing the current situation of Altran was done a gathering about some techniques and estimation methods, with the goal of applying them in the model creation, leading to more realistic results. The great ambition of the completion of this dissertation will evolve in the current methodology used, fulfilling the needs of the developed projects by Altran and the CMMI model practices that lead to a processes improvement for the products and services development.One of the steps of the estimation process is to define and apply feedback mechanisms with coefficients adjustment so that the analysis of each project type becomes more intuitive. In order to improve the estimation process, the proposal of the estimation methodology should be based on historical data from past completed projects, provided by Altran, which constitute one of the most important requirements of this dissertation. This proposal will include two variants, one based on a simple model, but with easy validation, making it more reliable for those who will use it. The other variant is a more complex model based on estimation techniques, which can be very useful in certain project types. Once the time to perform this dissertation is limited, the validation of the implemented models in future projects doesn't become viable and as such it was used the Cross-Validation method. The results showed great potential for estimates improving, compared with the current followed method, and with strong likelihood that eventually in future be possible to achieve more ambitious goals.Regarding to the structure of this document, initially is presented a problem analysis and subsequently is made a study about the state of the art. It is also described the proposed methodology and models, as well as the performed validation in order to make them more reliable and accurate. In conclusion, this dissertation addresses of a different way the estimation process followed by Altran and it is innovative since it uses estimation techniques. It is hoped that in future projects to be developed by this company have even more quality and that its expansion continues to increase exponentially.