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In agile software development, functionality is added to the system in an incremental and iterative manner. Practitioners often rely on expert-judgment to estimate effort in this context. The impact of a change on the existing system can provide objective information to practitioners to arrive at an informed estimate. In this regard, we have developed an innovative hybrid method that utilizes change impact analysis information for improving effort estimation. Additionally, an estimation model based on boosted trees is also developed. In this study, we evaluate the performance and usefulness of our innovative method and model in the context of agile software development from the perspective of agile development teams. A case study has been conducted with Insiders Technologies, a German software company, where we have applied our proposed method with tool-support in a live iteration and have evaluated it. The results show that the proposed method is useful and effective. It produces more accurate estimates than purely expert-based or purely model-based estimates.
Tanveer et al. (2018) studied this question.