Summary
This thesis investigates the collaborative work in software effort estimation by analyzing in depth the use of the three different estimation approaches: bottom-up, top-down and planning poker. The aim is to explicate teamwork processes and to contribute to the understanding of software effort estimation as collaborative planning activity. The empirical focus is on how teams of professionals with backgrounds in software development, create estimates of the work effort needed for developing new components of a software system. This work, which is called software effort estimation, constitutes a specific and important activity in software development projects as it is used for budgeting, planning and control. The thesis employs a sociocultural perspective on software effort estimation. The data material consists of a set of video recordings that have been gathered from two separate cases. Interaction analysis has been used as a means to investigate the communicative and interactional work teams of software professionals do when estimating software projects.
The findings show the need for extensive sense making and specification work in complex collaborative problem solving involved in software effort estimation. The three estimation approaches investigated did not take this sufficiently into account, as the teams needed to do a lot more work than what the idealised estimation approaches outlined. Three process models have been derived from the analysis and findings in the three articles and they demonstrate how the specification and sense-making processes are conducted and accomplished as interactional achievements in the collaborative work of software effort estimation. They also explicate the challenges faced by software professionals in this work. Together the three process models show how software effort estimation can be perceived as collaborative planning activity that play out in social interaction by way of meaning making processes, recontextualisation processes and different types of tool mediated actions.
The thesis is written within the field of workplace learning. The work has been conducted at Simula Research Laboratory and the Department of Educational Research, Faculty of Education, University of Oslo