Abstract

Effort estimation remains a cornerstone of software project management, playing a pivotal role in project planning, resource allocation, and overall success. Over the years, its importance has only grown as software projects have become more complex and diverse. To deepen understanding in this area, this paper conducted a comprehensive review of software effort estimation techniques, analyzing 21 studies published between 2014 and 2024. This review addressed four key research questions, revealing Planning Poker as the most widely used expert-based estimation technique and Random Forest as the most frequently applied method in machine-based estimation. The findings underscore that inaccurate effort estimation is often linked to issues in requirement definition and management. Additionally, the study examines the impact of software development processes on estimation accuracy. Finally, it identified key limitations and proposed future research directions from the reviewed papers, providing actionable insights to improve effort estimation methods and practices in the field.

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