A Study on “Key Activities in Managing Software Project Effort”

Accurate effort estimation is a crucial task for software business progression: for customers, acquiring software products or making project contracts for software implementation, accurate effort estimation enables adherence to schedule and budget without delay in deployment and introduction (Conte, et al., 1986; Sommer- ville, 2001). A software supplier organization strives to estimate the effort needed in building software as accurately as possible to ensure the project’s budget and schedule, and the success of resource allocation. Despite the numerous effort estimation approaches and applications available, the estimates have remained inaccurate. The objective of this paper is to find out the management practices of software development project effort, resulting in increased effort estimate accuracy. In the quest of its goal, the paper commences by presenting the theoretical background and the key concepts related to software project effort management approach. This paper focuses on an activity set of general software project activities, which are found to be one of the major software project activity categories besides software construction and project management effort.