The impact of customer expectation on software development effort estimates
By: Magne Jørgensen
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Contributor(s): Dag I. K. Sjøberg.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: Nijkerk : Elsevier, 2004International Journal of Project Management 22, 4, p. 317-325Abstract: The results from the study described in this paper suggest that customer expectations of a project's total cost can have a very large impact on human judgment-based estimates (expert estimates) of the most likely use of software development effort. The information that the customer expectations did not constitute valid input data for making estimates did not remove the impact. Surprisingly, the estimators did not notice this impact or assessed it to be low. An implication of the results is that the provision of a realistic project estimate of most likely use of effort may require that the estimators do not know the customer's expectations of the total cost of the project
The results from the study described in this paper suggest that customer expectations of a project's total cost can have a very large impact on human judgment-based estimates (expert estimates) of the most likely use of software development effort. The information that the customer expectations did not constitute valid input data for making estimates did not remove the impact. Surprisingly, the estimators did not notice this impact or assessed it to be low. An implication of the results is that the provision of a realistic project estimate of most likely use of effort may require that the estimators do not know the customer's expectations of the total cost of the project
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