Persistence in Poor Estimating in Software Engineering: Whys and Hows
- 11:00 10th June 2014 ( Trinity Term 2014 )Lecture Theatre B Wolfson Building
There has been a mind shift in software engineering for how software is built and managed. The software industry has been experiencing mainly three major trends. The first is the shift towards agility and leanness in software development. Being lean and agile is reflected both in practices and in outcomes. The second shift is re-definition of business models in order to distribute the development within a country and/or across borders to get benefits such as low cost, high productivity and time shifting. The third is the increase in scale of software systems. Furthermore, there is high uncertainty in how these will change in the near future.
The software industry has already been experiencing considerable challenges in project effort and cost estimating. Many projects fail or the ones delivered are with huge time and cost over-runs. Poor estimating processes and the uncertainty in requirements have been widely blamed for as major causes of the problems. In spite of the facts that considerable efforts have been put forth on improving estimations, it seems the problem continues to persist.
The aim of this talk is to elaborate on the ‘fundamental issues of poor estimating’ in software engineering. In particular; issues related to lack of standard and useful measures, well designed measurement instruments, and miss-conceptions in use of measures will be discussed by comparing the practices to those of mature engineering fields.
Speaker bio
Cigdem Gencel is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Free University of Bolzano, Italy. She received her PhD from the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University in Turkey in 2005 and continued her postdoctoral studies in the same university. Between 2008-2011, worked as an assistant professor in the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden.Her research focus is providing novel solutions to real industrial challenges, particularly in the areas of software measurement, software effort estimating, software value management and process improvement. She is a member of the International Advisory Council of the Common Software Measurement International Consortium and since 2011 has become a member of the Measurement Practices Committee.
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