Guest talk by Gregorio Robles

We will be hosting a research talk on “Estimating software development effort in open source projects” in the colloquium of the computer science department of FAU. The talk is free and open to the public.

• by: Prof. Dr. Gregorio Robles, URJC
• about: Estimating software development effort in open source projects
• on: May 8th, 2025, 16:00 Uhr (s.t.)
• at: Room 12801.01.254 - Felix Klein-Gebäude (1st floor) - Erlangen Südgelände
• as part of: Kolloquium des Department Informatik

Abstract: Effort estimation models are a critical tool in software management, serving as a forecast for the resources, constraints, and costs inherent in software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation presents unique challenges: the collaboration of professional and occasional, volunteer developers makes the determination of overall effort, measured in person-months, particularly complex. The goal of this talk is to present a simplified effort estimation model tailored to FOSS projects, leveraging historical developer effort data and over 1,000 questionnaire responses. Ultimately, I provide guidelines and a tool to facilitate the application of this model to FOSS projects, and I reflect on the potential impact of generative AI on its future use.

Speaker: Gregorio Robles is Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain. He mainly does research in the following two fields: a) Software engineering: he is specialized in software analytics of Open Source Software systems. His primary focus is on mining software repositories, socio-technical issues such as community metrics, software evolution, and development effort estimation; and b) Computational thinking (CT): he investigates the effect of using coding as a way to help students learn beyond coding, in particular how CT skills can be assessed.