Semester
Spring
Date of Graduation
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MS
College
Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources
Department
Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Committee Chair
Thomas Devine
Committee Co-Chair
Dale Dzielski
Committee Member
Dale Dzielski
Committee Member
Katerina Goseva-Popstojanova
Abstract
Software effort is a measure of manpower dedicated to developing and maintaining and software. Effort estimation can help project managers monitor their software, teams, and timelines. Conversely, improper effort estimation can result in budget overruns, delays, lost contracts, and accumulated Technical Debt (TD). Issue Tracking Systems (ITS) have become mainstream project management tools, with over 65,000 companies using Jira alone. ITS are an untapped resource for issue resolution effort research. Related work investigates issue effort for specific issue types, usually Bugs or similar. They model their developer-documented issue resolution times using features from the issues themselves. This thesis explores a novel issue effort estimation and prediction approach using developer-documented ITS effort in tandem with implementation metrics (commit metrics, package metrics, refactoring metrics, and smell metrics). We find consistent correlations between ITS effort and implementation metrics, ranging from weak to moderate strength. We also construct and evaluate several exploratory models to predict future package effort using our novel effort estimation, with inconclusive results.
Recommended Citation
MacLean, Paul Phillip, "Efficacy of Reported Issue Times as a Means for Effort Estimation" (2022). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 11196.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/11196