Effort Estimation Model for an Enterprise Software Upgrade

Determining the effort required to make a transition is one of the key factors that help in the decision-making of an enterprise software upgrade. In the last decade, extensive research has been carried out on Software Development Effort Estimation. The results show various models and approaches taken towards arriving at the effort needed during software development. However, to the best of our knowledge, no effective model has been studied that can estimate change efforts of upgrading a large productive enterprise system. In this paper, we propose a new model that uses both an algorithmic and non-algorithmic approach and comes up with efforts needed during the upgrade of an enterprise software. The proposed model has been evaluated through an extensive experimental validation and was applied to the upgrade of three enterprise systems of different domains (namely, Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management and Human Resource). The results obtained showed that the model was 91% accurate in providing effort estimates for the above mentioned three systems.