One of the problems in software cost estimation is how to evaluate estimation models. Estimation models are usually evaluated against two attributes: estimation accuracy and estimation consistency. A number of measures are reported in the literature, but they have shortcomings. There is no generally accepted standard to evaluate estimation models and the existing measures sometimes are not consistent among themselves. This paper examines existing measures of estimation accuracy and consistency and proposes two new ones: the weighted mean of quartiles of relative errors (WMQ) as a measure of accuracy and the standard deviation of the ratios of the estimate to actual observation (SDR) as a measure of consistency. Besides, a new regression criterion is proposed to determine model parameters. The proposed measures and criterion were tested with a data set from real world software projects. Results obtained show that these new measures and criterion overcome many of the difficulties of the existing ones.
Software storage structuring and retrieval remain a major challenge to the widespread adoption of software reuse. An approach that can facilitate the automatic structuring of software components libraries is presented here. Based on the automatic indexing and the self-organising map (SOM) technologies, key features associated with software components can be identified and organised in a very simple way that makes their distance relations geographically explicit on the two-dimensional output layer of the SOM. The proposed approach was applied to a collection of UNIX commands to evaluate its retrival effectiveness. Preliminary results were encouraging and showed improvement on both recall and precision, with substantial reduction in the amount of human effort required in the process.
To improve their operational efficiency and to maintain their competitiveness in the market place many organisations continue to invest substantially in their Information Technology (IT) capability. But how do the employees themselves view the impact and the value of IT investment? This paper considers this question in the context of the hospitality industry. More specifically, it investigates the different perception of hotel employees on the impact of organisational IT investment on (a) IT usage by employees, (b) employee satisfaction with the IT systems, (c) changes in the level of employee performance, and (d) organisational performance of the hotel. 945 hotel employees in Bali, Indonesia were surveyed to assess their perception of the organisational impact of IT. Factor analysis, analysis of variance and regression analysis were performed on the data to examine the' range of employee viewpoints. Results showed that there were significant differences among the employees' perception with respect to age, educational level, position in the hotel, and individual income. These findings suggest that even senior management may regard the investment in IT is worthwhile, there may be a divergence of opinion among the employees as to what are the real benefits of IT. In order to fully leverage the potential of their IT investment, managers should pay particular attention to shaping the views of the employees who ultimately determine whether the IT capabilities in an organisation are put to use.
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