Circumstantial-Evidence-Based Judgment for Software Effort Estimation

Expert judgment for software effort estimation is oriented toward direct evidences that refer to actual effort of similar projects or activities through experts' experiences. However, the availability of direct evidences implies the requirement of suitable experts together with past data. The circumstantial-evidence-based judgment proposed in this paper focuses on the development experiences deposited in human knowledge, and can then be used to qualitatively estimate implementation effort of different proposals of a new project by rational inference. To demonstrate the process of circumstantial-evidence-based judgment, this paper adopts propositional learning theory based diagnostic reasoning to infer and compare different effort estimates when implementing a Web service composition project with some different techniques and contexts.