Using Regression Analysis For Predicting Software Development Schedule

As one of the most important tasks in judging the feasibility of software project, and in supporting to get project well planned, predicting software development schedule is a key task in software development. Moreover, alonging with the expanding of the scale and investment in software projects, software development schedule now plays a significant role. It's required to find out a proper, specialized method in accurately predicting the schedule. In software developing field, how to estimate the cost and schedule is a tough issue. This thesis initiates a regression method to tackle the problem by concerning with the factors influent schedule variation. By this method, we will extract those common factors and construct a schedule model to perdict and explaing the schedule. The major work and outcome are outlined as below:1, using fishbowl diagram and ANOVA method to extract the common factors which effects schedule, and construct the model by simple regression analysis method;2, leveraging multiple regression method to construct a software development schedule model which involves multiple factors, and specifies the method of predicting interval;3, advancing to a stepwise regression method to refine the model, to ease the duplication and overlapping of those predicting factors, and we also illustrate the non-linear schedule model.This thesis steps forward in software development schedule since we present a refined regression method, which is not considered by conventional models, and we also propose a non-linear regression model. Furthermore, we will continue to work in areas such as how to construct non-linear regression model, how to practice the method upon real projects, and how to estimate the viarations of different projects, or different phases in projects.