Software project effort assessment

Software project assessments and postmortem analyses can increase the success of future projects and forthcoming project phases. However, although assessments and analyses are well-presented in the software engineering literature, they are short of descriptions to assess effort. This paper proposes a stepwise effort assessment method that strives to facilitate learning from past experiences and to increase effort estimation accuracy by exploring realized project effort. The proposed method can be used either to assess the realized project effort of a time span from project's lifecycle or as a part of the whole project postmortem analysis in producing effort information for the project iteration assessment, final report, and annual project portfolio report. In addition, the effort information increases the project team's knowledge on realized activity sets and their relationships, and the information can be utilized in estimation method and model calibration for both re-estimations and future estimations. The method was evaluated with case projects, a sample supplied by Tieto Finland Oy. Copyright© 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.