Development Effort Estimation Practices in Small Software Companies: An Exploratory Study

The software engineering research recognizes that small software companies are different to medium-sized and large organizations. Therefore, they require particular implementations of already known software practices to support their developments; this includes the estimation of the software development effort. The literature reports that estimation techniques based on expert judgement are preferred by the software industry in general, however, it is not clear what practices are used by small software companies and why they use them. Trying to clarify these aspects, particularly for small software companies in Chile, this article presents an empirical study based on semi-structured interviews that explores the effort estimation practices used by ten business stable organizations. The study results show the practices preferred by them, the reasons behind their preferences, and the expected accuracy of their estimates. The study also shows that using an appropriate estimation technique is not enough to keep the estimates under control.