Hybrid effort estimation of changes in agile software development

Unlike traditional software development approaches, Agile embraces change. The resulting dynamism of requirements makes it challenging to estimate effort accurately. Current practice relies on expert-judgment that can be biased, labor intensive and inaccurate. Therefore, a systematic yet lightweight effort estimation methodology is needed to support expert judgment and improve its effectiveness. Such an approach will utilize the quantification of the impact of a requirement on software artifacts potentially affected by it. It will further introduce an explicit consideration of effort drivers that contribute to effort overhead. The aim is to synthesize research from three often orthogonal areas of research: (1) change impact analysis, (2) effort estimation (model and expert driven) and (3) software visualization. Hence, resulting in a hybrid methodology with tool support that incorporates expert knowledge, change impact analysis and enables an explicit consideration of cost drivers by experts to improve the effectiveness of effort estimation process.