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Proxy-based estimating
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<p>Proxy-Based Estimating (PROBE) is an estimating process used in the <a href="/facts/Personal_Software_Process/JFxCN9G7">Personal Software Process</a> (PSP) to estimate size and effort. </p><p>Proxy Based Estimating (PROBE), is the estimation method introduced by <a href="/facts/Watts_Humphrey/mzJ3w54p">Watts Humphrey</a> (of the <a href="/facts/Software_Engineering_Institute/uMJyBSNj">Software Engineering Institute</a> at <a href="/facts/Carnegie_Mellon_University/XKd7L2KA">Carnegie Mellon University</a>) as part of the Personal Software Process (a discipline that helps individual software engineers monitor, test, and improve their own work). </p><p>PROBE is based on the idea that if an engineer is building a component similar to one they built previously, then it will take about the same effort as it did in the past. </p><p>In the PROBE method, individual engineers use a database to keep track of the size and effort of all of the work that they do, developing a history of the effort they have put into their past projects, broken into individual components. Each component in the database is assigned a type (“calculation,” “data,” “logic,” etc.) and a size (from “very small” to “very large”). When a new project must be estimated, it is broken down into tasks that correspond to these types and sizes. A formula based on linear regression is used to calculate the estimate for each task. </p><p>Additional information on PROBE can be found in A Discipline for Software Engineering by Watts Humphrey (Addison Wesley, 1994). </p> <ul><li>Alba-Castro, M.; Hurtado Gil, S. (May 2011). <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5936306">"Validation and calibration of Quantitative models for software development effort and size estimation"</a>. <i>2011 6th Colombian Computing Congress (CCC)</i>. <a href="/facts/Institute_of_Electrical_and_Electronics_Engineers/UddC4pUW">Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers</a>: 1–6. <a href="/facts/Doi_(identifier)/muM9Etpq">doi</a>:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1109%2FCOLOMCC.2011.5936306">10.1109/COLOMCC.2011.5936306</a>. Retrieved 31 March 2025.</li></ul>