1. Modeling Uncertainty when Estimating IT Projects Costs
- Author
-
Winter, Michel, Mirbel, Isabelle, Crescenzo, Pierre, Université Côte d'Azur (UCA), Scalable and Pervasive softwARe and Knowledge Systems (Laboratoire I3S - SPARKS), Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis (I3S), Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (... - 2019) (UNS), COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Côte d'Azur (UCA)-Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (... - 2019) (UNS), COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Côte d'Azur (UCA), and I3S
- Subjects
IT Project ,[SHS.STAT]Humanities and Social Sciences/Methods and statistics ,[SHS.INFO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Library and information sciences ,[INFO.INFO-DS]Computer Science [cs]/Data Structures and Algorithms [cs.DS] ,[SCCO.COMP]Cognitive science/Computer science ,[INFO.INFO-SE]Computer Science [cs]/Software Engineering [cs.SE] ,[INFO.INFO-MO]Computer Science [cs]/Modeling and Simulation ,[INFO.INFO-CL]Computer Science [cs]/Computation and Language [cs.CL] ,Monte-Carlo Method ,Cost Estimation ,[INFO.INFO-CY]Computer Science [cs]/Computers and Society [cs.CY] ,PERT ,[SHS.GESTION]Humanities and Social Sciences/Business administration ,[INFO]Computer Science [cs] - Abstract
In the current economic context, optimizing projects' cost is an obligation for a company to remain competitive in its market. Introducing statistical uncertainty in cost estimation is a good way to tackle the risk of going too far while minimizing the project budget: it allows the company to determine the best possible trade-off between estimated cost and acceptable risk. In this paper, we present new statistical estimators derived from the way IT companies estimate the projects' costs. In the current practice, the software to develop is progressively divided into smaller pieces until it becomes easy to estimate the associated development workload and the workloads of the usual additionnal activities (documentation, test, project management,...) are deduced from the development workload by applying ratios. Finally, the total cost is derived from the resulting workload by applying a daily rate. This way, the overall workload cannot be calculated nor estimated analytically. We thus propose to use Monte-Carlo simulations on PERT and dependency graphs to obtain the cost distribution of the project.
- Published
- 2014