An empirical validation of software cost estimation models
Communications of the ACM
Function Points in the Estimation and Evaluation of the Software Process
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Reliability of function points measurement: a field experiment
Communications of the ACM
Robust regression for developing software estimation models
Journal of Systems and Software
Evaluating Alternative Software Production Functions
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A field study of scale economies in software maintenance
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Experience With the Accuracy of Software Maintenance Task Effort Prediction Models
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An empirical study of maintenance and development estimation accuracy
Journal of Systems and Software
An Experimental Study on the Reliability of COSMIC Measurement Results
IWSM '09 /Mensura '09 Proceedings of the International Conferences on Software Process and Product Measurement
Modeling the relationship between software effort and size using deming regression
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering
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Many research studies report an economy of scale in software development, i.e., an increase in productivity with increasing project size. Several software practitioners seem, on the other hand, to believe in a diseconomy of scale, i.e., a decrease in productivity with increasing project size. In this paper we argue that violations of essential regression model assumptions in the research studies to a large extent may explain this disagreement. Particularly illustrating is the finding that the use of the production function (Size=a.Effort^b), instead of the factor input model (Effort=a.Size^b), would most likely have led to the opposite result, i.e., a tendency towards reporting diseconomy of scale in the research studies. We conclude that there are good reasons to warn against the use of regression analysis parameters to investigate economies of scale and to look for other analysis methods when studying economy of scale in software development contexts.