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Over/under estimation factor for ‘most estimates’

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

When asked to estimate the time taken to perform a software development related task, people regularly over or under estimate. What range of over/under estimation falls within the bounds of the term ‘most estimates’, i.e., the upper/lower bounds of the ratio Actual/Estimate (an overestimate occurs when Actual/Estimate < 1, an underestimate when 1 < Actual/Estimate)?

On Twitter, I have been citing a factor of two for over/under time estimates. This factor of two involves some assumptions and a personal interpretation.

The following analysis is based on the two major software task effort estimation datasets: SiP and CESAW. The tasks in both datasets are for internal projects (i.e., no tendering against competitors), and require at most a few hours work.

The following analysis is based on the SiP data.

Of the 8,252 unique tasks in the SiP data, 30% are underestimates, 37% exact, and 33% overestimates.

How do we go about calculating bounds for the over/under factor of most estimates (a previous post discussed calculating an accuracy metric over all estimates)?

A simplistic approach is to average over each of the overestimated and underestimated tasks. The plot below shows hours estimated against the ratio actual/estimated, for each task (code+data):

Actual/estimate ratio for SiP tasks having a given Estimate value.

Averaging the over/under estimated tasks separately (using the geometric mean) gives 0.47 and 1.9 respectively, i.e., tasks are over/under estimated by a factor of two.

This approach fails to take into account the number of estimates that are over/under/equal, i.e., it ignores likelihood information.

A regression model takes into account the distribution of values, and we could adopt the fitted model’s prediction interval as the over/under confidence intervals. The prediction interval is the interval within which other observations are expected to fall, with some probability (R’s predict function uses one standard deviation).

The plot below shows a fitted regression model and prediction intervals at one standard deviation (68.3%) and two standard deviations (95%); the faint grey line shows Estimate == Actual (code+data):

Fitted regression model and prediction intervals at 68.3% and 95%.

The fitted model tilts down from the upward direction of the Estimate == Actual line, consequently the over/under estimation factor depends on the size of the estimate. The table below lists the over/under estimation factor for low/high estimates at one & two standard deviations (68.3 and 95% probability).

People like simple answers (i.e., single values) and the mean value is a commonly used technique of summarising many values. The task estimate values are unevenly distributed and weighting the mean by the distribution of estimated values is more representative than, say, an evenly distributed set of estimates. The 5th and 6th columns in the table below list the weighted means at one/two standard deviations (the CESAW columns are the values for all projects in the CESAW data).

          1 sd           2 sd        Weighted mean       CESAW
       Low    High   Low    High     1 sd    2 sd     1 sd   2 sd
Over   0.56   0.24   0.27   0.11     0.46    0.25     0.29   0.1
Under  2.4    1.0    4.9    2.0      2.00    4.1      2.4    6.5

The weighted means for over/under estimates are close to a factor of two of the actual (divide/multiply) within one standard deviation (68.3%), and a factor of four within two standard deviations (95%).

Why choose to give the one standard deviation factor, rather than the two? People talk of “most estimates”, but what percentage range does ‘most’ map to? I have tended to think of ‘most’ as more than two-thirds, e.g., at least one standard deviation (a recent study suggests that ‘most’ usage peaks at 80-85%), and I think of two standard deviations as ‘nearly all’ (i.e., 95%; there are probably people who call this ‘most’).

Perhaps a between two and four is a more appropriate answer (particularly since the bounds are wider for the CESAW data). Suggestions welcome.

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Another nail for the coffin of past effort estimation research

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Programs are built from lines of code written by programmers. Lines of code played a starring role in many early effort estimation techniques (section 5.3.1 of my book). Why would anybody think that it was even possible to accurately estimate the number of lines of code needed to implement a library/program, let alone use it for estimating effort?

Until recently, say up to the early 1990s, there were lots of different computer systems, some with multiple (incompatible’ish) operating systems, almost non-existent selection of non-vendor supplied libraries/packages, and programs providing more-or-less the same functionality were written more-or-less from scratch by different people/teams. People knew people who had done it before, or even done it before themselves, so information on lines of code was available.

The numeric values for the parameters appearing in models were obtained by fitting data on recorded effort and lines needed to implement various programs (63 sets of values, one for each of the 63 programs in the case of COCOMO).

How accurate is estimated lines of code likely to be (this estimate will be plugged into a model fitted using actual lines of code)?

I’m not asking about the accuracy of effort estimates calculated using techniques based on lines of code; studies repeatedly show very poor accuracy.

There is data showing that different people implement the same functionality with programs containing a wide range of number of lines of code, e.g., the 3n+1 problem.

I recently discovered, tucked away in a dataset I had previously analyzed, developer estimates of the number of lines of code they expected to add/modify/delete to implement some functionality, along with the actuals.

The following plot shows estimated added+modified lines of code against actual, for 2,692 tasks. The fitted regression line, in red, is: Actual = 5.9Estimated^{0.72} (the standard error on the exponent is pm 0.02), the green line shows Actual==Estimated (code+data):

Estimated and actual lines of code added+modified to implement a task.

The fitted red line, for lines of code, shows the pattern commonly seen with effort estimation, i.e., underestimating small values and over estimating large values; but there is a much wider spread of actuals, and the cross-over point is much further up (if estimates below 50-lines are excluded, the exponent increases to 0.92, and the intercept decreases to 2, and the line shifts a bit.). The vertical river of actuals either side of the 10-LOC estimate looks very odd (estimating such small values happen when people estimate everything).

My article pointing out that software effort estimation is mostly fake research has been widely read (it appears in the first three results returned by a Google search on software fake research). The early researchers did some real research to build these models, but later researchers have been blindly following the early ‘prophets’ (i.e., later research is fake).

Lines of code probably does have an impact on effort, but estimating lines of code is a fool’s errand, and plugging estimates into models built from actuals is just crazy.