Training and re-using human experience: a recommender for more accurate cost estimates in project planning

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Publication date
2018
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04B - Conference paper
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Parent work
IC3K 2018 - Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
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DOI of the original publication
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Series number
Volume
Issue / Number
Pages / Duration
52-62
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Publisher / Publishing institution
SciTePress
Place of publication / Event location
Setúbal
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Abstract
In many industries, companies deliver customised solutions to their (business) customers within projects. Estimating the human effort involved in such projects is a difficult task and underestimating efforts can lead to non-billable hours, i.e. financial loss on the side of the solution provider. Previous work in this area has focused on automatic estimation of the cost of software projects and has largely ignored the interaction between automated estimation support and human project leads. Our main hypothesis is that an adequate design of such interaction will increase the acceptance of automatically derived estimates and that it will allow for a fruitful combination of data-driven insights and human experience. We therefore build a recommender that is applicable beyond software projects and that suggests job positions to be added to projects and estimated effort of such positions. The recommender is based on the analysis of similar cases (case-based reasoning), "explains" derived similarities and allows human intervention to manually adjust the outcomes. Our experiments show that recommendations were considered helpful and that the ability of the system to explain and adjust these recommendations was heavily used and increased the trust in the system. We conjecture that the interaction of project leads with the system will help to further improve the accuracy of recommendations and the support of human learning in the future.
Keywords
Subject (DDC)
330 - Wirtschaft
Project
Event
10th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS)
Exhibition start date
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Conference start date
18.09.2018
Conference end date
20.09.2018
Date of the last check
ISBN
978-989-758-330-8
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Language
English
Created during FHNW affiliation
Yes
Strategic action fields FHNW
Publication status
Published
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Peer review of the complete publication
Open access category
Closed
License
Citation
RUDOLF VON ROHR, Christian, Hans Friedrich WITSCHEL und Andreas MARTIN, 2018. Training and re-using human experience: a recommender for more accurate cost estimates in project planning. In: IC3K 2018 - Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. Setúbal: SciTePress. 2018. S. 52–62. ISBN 978-989-758-330-8. Verfügbar unter: https://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/42357