The influence of leadership and work culture on software cost effort

Globalization is adding more dimensions to software effort estimation process. The notions of leadership and culture carry with them highly variable assumptions, and thus, must be explicitly modeled. A new model that incorporates leadership and culture is proposed, elaborated and validated. A survey was undertaken to determine the impact of culture and its effect on the software development process in the areas of project team timeliness, collaboration and team work, leadership characteristics, cultural intelligence, motivation and communication. The use of the Bootstrap method for estimating the effort involved in a given project, along with analogies using real historical data, demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in surmounting difficulties in describing abstract quantitative variables. Our approach is tested on a cluster sample dataset of 41 cases (projects) collected in 2007 from more than 20 organizations. The results show that the inclusion of leadership and culture in the cost estimation model improves the accuracy of software cost estimation.