Cost estimation of software intensive projects: a survey of current practices
ICSE '91 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Software engineering
Software Engineering Economics
Software Engineering Economics
Project estimation using Screenflow Engineering
SEEP '96 Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Software Engineering: Education and Practice (SE:EP '96)
A Review of Surveys on Software Effort Estimation
ISESE '03 Proceedings of the 2003 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
A review of studies on expert estimation of software development effort
Journal of Systems and Software
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
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Overoptimistic predictions are common in software engineering projects, e.g., the average software project cost overrun is about 30%. This paper examines the use of two popular general tests of optimism (the ASQ and the LOT-R test) to select software engineers that are less likely to provide overoptimistic predictions. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for this use is that there is a strong relationship between optimism score, as measured by the ASQ and LOT-R tests, and predictions. We report from two experiments on this topic. The experiments suggest that the relation between optimism score as measured by ASQ or LOT-R and predictions is too weak to enable a use of these optimism measurement instruments to select more realistic estimators in software organizations. Our results also suggest that a person's general level of optimism and over-optimistic predictions of performance are, to a large extent, unrelated.