Addition of a Software Estimation Capability to the SimSE Educational Software Game

Industry Context

Estimation of software projects efforts is one of the early management tasks in a software initiative and a particularly challenging one. To train software project managers, simulation tools based on games concepts and technologies have been used successfully. However, available educational simulators do not tackle this first critical task in a software project, that is the estimation of the software project effort. The SimSE project will add a state-of-the-art software estimation capability to the current educational game software used in software project management courses. It will integrate the COSMIC – ISO 19761 standard on software functional size measurement as well as a-posteriori and a-priori software estimation models.

SimSE Taskforce approach

This project will integrate many concepts and techniques from the project management body of knowledge but which are addressed disjointly in the software engineering literature in general and almost never in the software estimation literature:

  • Early sizing of software of both software requirements and non-functional requirements.
  • Integration of early software sizing into both a-priori and a-posteriori estimation models to identify plausible ranges of estimated efforts, instead of a single-point estimate.
  • Development of decision- making models for selecting a specific budget value and a related contingency.
  • Project monitoring and re-estimation when required.
  • Software portfolio estimation and management monitoring.

Benefits

The state-of-the-art software estimation capability to the SimSE educational game software will be used in software project management courses. It will teach players to make decisions, manage resources and track progress during the whole estimation process.

Professional Contributors:

Task force leader: 

Core members:

Dr. Alain Abran
Dr. Alain April
Dr. Jean-Marc Desharnais
Sion Israel PhD. Student
Ling Guo PhD. Student