@article{9036,
  author = {Stein Grimstad and Magne J{\o}rgensen},
  title = {The Impact of Irrelevant Information on Estimates of Software Development Effort},
  abstract = {Software professionals typically estimate software development effort on the basis of a requirement specification. Parts of this specification frequently contain information that is irrelevant to the estimation of the actual effort involved in the development of software. We hypothesize that effort-irrelevant information sometimes has a strong impact on effort estimates. To test this hypothesis, we conducted three controlled experiments with software professionals. In each of the experiments, the software professionals received specifications describing the same requirements. However, we gave one group of the software professionals a version of the requirement specification where we had included additional, effort-irrelevant, information. In all three experiments, we observed that the estimates of most likely effort increased when the estimates were based on requirement specifications that contained the information irrelevant to development effort. The results suggest that when estimation-irrelevant information is included as input to expert judgment-based estimation processes, the estimators find it difficult to ignore it. The results also show that it is difficult to predict the impact of estimation-irrelevant information and that software professionals seem to be unaware of the impact. One possible (and advisable) course of action, given our findings, would be to remove estimation-irrelevant information from the requirement specification prior to the use of it as input to estimation work.},
  year = {2008},
  journal = {Journal of Systems and Software},
}