Software projects are often late and over-budget and this leads to major problems for software customers. Clearly, there is a serious issue in estimating a realistic, software project budget. Furthermore, generic estimation models cannot be trusted to provide credible estimates for projects as complex as software projects.

This book presents a number of examples using data collected over the years from various organizations building software. It also presents an overview of the non-for-profit organization, which collects data on software projects, the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group. This data collection is based on the ISO standards for measuring the functional size of software.

Additional features of this book are:

• End-of-chapter exercises and 'terms assignments'
• 100+ figures to illustrate concepts presented throughout the book
• Examples with industry data
• References to the ISO standards and the standards of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG)

In summary, Dr. Abran instructs readers how to build their own estimation models from the data of an organization using a sounds statistical basis, and how to focus on the quality of the estimation models built.