A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT EFFORT REESTIMATION
FOR AN ONGOING SOFTWARE PROJECT

The recent CHAOS Report released in 2015 indicated that the successful rate of software project is still low at 29%.  There is still a lot of work to be done in order to reduce software project failures.  Requirement changes are considered as a challenging area of research by the software project manager (SPM) and the software engineering community and it has been one of the main causes of project failures (Ramzan & Ikram, 2005; Taylor, 2000; Oz, 1994).

If the requirement change requested by the client during ongoing project is accommodated, the initial amount of work predicted for the project will no longer be valid.  The effort involved in the project has to be re-estimated (Ahonen, Savolainen, Merikoski, & Nevalainen, 2015)(Lee, Hsu, Lee, & Kuo, 2012).  If the request for changes is not entertained, the client is bound to be dissatisfied and this will worsen the software project manager-client relationship.  Client will not be happy and collaboration to make the project successful will be difficult.

The SPM has to make the best decision on how to handle requirement changes throughout the software development phase.  An estimation model is necessary to aid the SPM to re-estimate the cost and effort of the software development.  Poor estimation can only cause challenges in project management and software quality (Singh, Misra, & Statement, 2012)(MacDonell & Shepperd, 2003).  Existing estimation techniques lack the accuracy and flexibility (Bardsiri, Jawawi, Bardsiri, & Khatibi, 2013).  No one estimate is accurate (Jorgensen, 2012).  Hence, further research needs to be done to improve accuracy of software estimation (Peixoto, Audy, & Prikladnicki, 2010).  Expert judgement technique will be incorporated into existing algorithmic based estimation model to introduce some human touch into the decision making module.  Interviews with the appropriate experts will be conducted in this research.