Post-Project Effort Analysis Method

Rapid changes in IT business sets challenges to software project effort estimation. Although the requirements for the effort estimation accuracy vary in relation to the stakeholder, high accuracy is always pursued. This paper proposes a stepwise post-project effort analysis method to increase estimation accuracy by exploring realized project effort. The proposed method can be used either independently or as a part of the whole project post-mortem analysis to produce effort information for the project final report, the annual projects report, and calibration input for the employed effort estimation method. Furthermore, the method facilitates the evaluation of both the existing effort and the cost estimation models' effort factor and driver weighting. The method was evaluated with a case study with a real software development projects data sample supplied by TietoEnator Telecom & Media.