An Improvement in the Effort Estimation in Software Projects

Software project failure and success has been studied for years but still the rate of challenged or failed projects is quite high. Projects still exceed their schedules and budgets and don’t achieve the quality requirements. According to the literature only 29 % of software projects succeed and 18 % of them fail. The remaining 53 % of projects are completed over schedule and budget. Since the software project deviations are a less studied field. This research provides a methodology to overcome the deviations.

A study is conducted in the present research to find the deviation between the estimated and actual time with respect to effort deviation. A real time data were collected for estimated and actual time spent for the different phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The data were grouped phase wise for the analysis and bar charts were constructed to know the deviations in effort. A corrected estimated effort is introduced in this study to improve the software project process.