An empirircal assessment of project duration models in software engineering

Many parametric models based on estimates of project effort have been proposed in the literature to predict the duration of software development projects. Among these, COCOMO has received wide attention. A comparison of the duration estimates obtained from this model with those from an empirical model derived from a set of historical data maintained by the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) is presented in this paper. It is shown that the COCOMO duration estimates are “optimistic” when compared to the empirical model estimates. Using quantitative evaluation criteria, this paper also shows that the goodness of the COCOMO duration models is very close to the goodness of the empirical model in spite of fact that the data used to derive the COCOMO duration models are roughly 20 years old.