Software Cost Estimation, Benchmarking, and Risk Assessment: The Software Decision-Makers' Guide to Predictable Software Development

Software effort estimation is a key element of software project planning and management. Yet, in industrial practice, the important role of effort estimation is often underestimated and/or misunderstood.

In this book, Adam Trendowicz presents the CoBRA method  (an abbreviation for Cost Estimation, Benchmarking, and Risk Assessment) for estimating the effort required to successfully complete a software development project, which uniquely combines human judgment and measurement data in order to systematically create a custom-specific effort estimation model. CoBRA goes far beyond simply predicting the development effort; it supports project decision-makers in negotiating the project scope, managing project risks, benchmarking productivity, and directing improvement activities. To illustrate the method’s practical use, the book reports several real-world cases where CoBRA was applied in various industrial contexts. These cases represent different estimation contexts in terms of software project environment, estimation objectives, and estimation constraints.

This book is the result of a successful collaboration between the process management division of Fraunhofer IESE and many software companies in the field of software engineering technology transfer. It mainly addresses software practitioners who deal with planning and managing software development projects as part of their daily work, and is also of interest for students or courses specializing in software engineering or software project management.

Adam Trendowicz is a senior consultant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany.  He has led software cost estimation and software measurement improvement activities in software companies of different sizes and from various domains (e.g., in Germany, Japan, and India), and he has been involved in functional software size estimation (Function Points Analysis) and productivity benchmarking in organizations from both the industry and the public sector. His research interests include measurement-based controlling of software products and processes, software quality modeling and evaluation, and technology validation by means of empirical methods.