A Comparative Study of the Accuracy and Efficiency of Wideband Delphi and Planning Poker Software Effort Estimation Techniques

Estimating the effort required to develop a software project in an accurate and efficient manner is vital for software project managers. This research focuses on two well-known group-based effort estimation techniques i.e. Wideband Delphi and Planning Poker. A controlled experiment is designed and conducted to compare the estimation accuracy and efficiency of these two techniques. Two comparable teams of 5 practitioners each are formed for this purpose. One team is trained to use the Wideband Delphi process for estimation while the other is trained to follow the Planning Poker process. Both teams are asked to estimate the development effort of two different types of 10 real life software projects – 5 web apps and 5 mobile apps. Two well-known estimation accuracy metrics - MMRE and PRED(x) – are used to measure the estimation accuracy while the efficiency is measured in terms of the person hours (PH) consumed to complete the estimation process. Results of the comparison reveal that Wideband Delphi has a better estimation accuracy as compared to Planning Poker for both web and mobile apps. Planning Poker, however, is found to be more efficient for both types of apps.