A systematic review of cross- vs. within- company cost estimation studies

  • Authors:

  • Barbara Kitchenham;Emilia Mendes;Guilherme H. Travassos

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK and National ICT Australia, Alexandria, Australia;Computer Science Department, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand;UFRJ/COPPE, Systems Engineering and Computer Science Program, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • EASE'06 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

OBJECTIVE - The objective of this paper is to determine under what circumstances individual organisations would be able to rely on cross-company based estimation models. METHOD - We performed a systematic review of studies that compared predictions from crosscompany models with predictions from within-company models based on analysis of project data. RESULTS - Ten papers compared cross-company and within-company estimation models, however, only seven of the papers presented independent results. Of those seven, three found that crosscompany models were as good as within-company models, four found cross-company models were significantly worse than within-company models. Experimental procedures used by the studies differed making it impossible to undertake formal meta-analysis of the results. The main trend distinguishing study results was that studies with small single company data sets (i.e. CONCLUSIONS - The results of this review are inconclusive. It is clear that some organisations would be ill-served by cross-company models whereas others would benefit. Further studies are needed, but they must be independent (i.e. based on different data bases or at least different single company data sets). In addition, experimenters need to standardise their experimental procedures to enable formal meta-analysis.