You are here: Home Basic Research PREPARE - Practices for Estimation, Planning And Requirements




Hans Christian Benestad
Head of Research Group
benestad@simula.no
+47 982 57 805

Unrealistic plans following from poorly understood requirements and overoptimistic estimates is one of the most important reasons of IT-project failures. The goal of PREPARE is to improve practices and tools used in the software industry for creating and using software requirements, effort estimates and project plans, through empirical research founded in multidisciplinary theory.

Research focus

Our focus is on practices that have human judgment and decision making as key elements. Results from PREPARE aims at better control of software projects and more efficient use of IT resources and investments. Software product requirements are the most important input to estimates and plans for software development efforts. In the software industry, such requirements are most often documented in natural language. Our research aims at identifying practices for documenting natural language requirements to make them more suited as input to cost estimation and planning of software development activities. With well-described requirements and realistic estimates in place, software projects must assess uncertainty and risks, resource constraints and priorities. Creating and maintaining appropriate project plans based on all such input can only partly be formalized and must to a large extent rely on human judgment. PREPARE aims to improve the judgment-based practices involved in creating and maintaining software project plans.

Projects

  • BEST - Research project: Better Estimation of Software Tasks
  • PLASMA - Research project: Planning in Large Agile Projects
  • EstimationWeb - Innovation project: Tools for improved software cost estimation in the IT industry
  • AGILE - BIA project: Improved agile processes in the software industry

 

People

 

prepare_people

 

 

 

Personal tools