Leveraging IT project lifecycle data to predict support costs

Abstract

There is an intuitive notion that the costs associated with project support actions, currently deemed too high and increasing, are directly related to the effort spent during their development and test phases. Despite the importance of systematically characterizing and understanding this relationship, little has been done in this realm mainly due to the lack of proper tooling for both sharing information between IT project phases and learning from past experiences. To tackle this issue, in this paper we propose a solution that, leveraging existing IT project lifecycle data, is able to predict support costs. The solution has been evaluated through a case study based on the ISBSG dataset, producing correct estimates for more than 80% of the assessed scenarios1.