Effort Prediction with Limited Data: A Case Study for Data Warehouse Projects

Abstract

Organizations may create a sustainable competitive advantage against competitors by using data warehouse systems with which they can assess the current status of their operations at any moment. They can analyze trends and connections using up-to-date data. However, data warehouse projects tend to fail more often than other projects as it can be tough to estimate the effort required to build a data warehouse system. Functional size measurement is one of the methods used as an input for estimating the amount of work in a software project. In this study, we formed a measurement basis for DWH projects in an organization based on the COSMIC Functional Size Measurement Method. We mapped COSMIC rules on two different architectures used for DWH projects in the organization and measured the size of the projects. We calculated the productivity of the projects and compared them with the organization’s previous projects and DWH projects in the ISBSG repository. We could not create an organization-wide effort estimation model as we had a limited number of projects. As an alternative, we evaluated the success of effort estimation using DWH projects in the ISBSG repository. We also reported the challenges we faced during the size measurement process.