Advances in Engineering Software 171 (2022) 103159 Available online 17 June 2022 0965-9978/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Research article A software-based cost estimation technique in scrum using a developer’s expertise Shariq Aziz Butt a, * , Ayesha Khalid a , Tuncay Ercan b , Paola Patricia Ariza-Colpas c , Acosta-Coll Melisa c , Gabriel Pi ˜ neres-Espitia c , Emiro De-La-Hoz-Franco c , Marlon Alberto Pineres Melo d , Roberto Morales Ortega c a Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, The University of Lahore, Pakistan b Department of Management Information Systems, Yasar University, Turkey c Universidad de la Costa, Colombia d Universidad del Norte, Colombia A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Scrum projects Cost estimation techniques Issues in the scrum ABSTRACT Background: Scrum methodology is the most useful and adopted part of the agile methodology. Many organi- zations are adopting Scrum for the last decade to meet their software requirements. It is facilitating the software industries to develop software applications according to the user’s requirements. Objective: Scrum helps to fulfll the customer’s requirements by interacting with the client and developer. Instead of this, scrum still has some challenges that infuence the cost of a scrum. These challenging factors include coordination, team size, change request, complexity, and issues in daily meeting sessions. Due to these factors mostly the cost and time exceed scrum-based projects. To overcome these issues from the accurate and precise estimation in the scrum project we have developed a web-based software system to estimate the effort of a user story as well as the budget. Methodology: There are some sophisticated cost estimation techniques for scrum-based projects. But all estima- tion techniques have some limitations that make them less useful for estimation and overcoming the effects of these factors in the scrum. We have surveyed the multiple software industries to get the static fndings of the survey. We have designed the 30 hypotheses that main aim to reveal how much the proposed estimation technique is valuable for the accuracy of estimation. For the inclusion of participants, we have set the age criteria to get the opinions of the most experienced programmers. Results: The main aim of this paper is to provide knowledge about key challenging factors in Scrum that cause exceed in cost and time, and also briefy explain why existing scrum cost estimation techniques are not pertinent for projects. In the last, we propose a framework as a solution to manage these factors and control cost and time from exceeding. We also adopted this estimation technique in different case studies in software industries for fndings and results. The technique calculates the efforts autonomously. We design a software-based estimation technique that collects inputs from team/s and estimates the cost and time of a project. Conclusion: In outcomes, we found that our cost estimation approach reduced the issues from scrum software project development and make it more profcient for estimation of projects. Our proposed estimation technique introduced the new concept of estimation that facilitate the client, software industry, and developers as well to meet the requirements of the client, fulfll the changes during the sprints/s development and deliver the project within the time and cost. 1. Introduction Software Project Management is a combination of different processes like planning, organizing, controlling, and interaction between members. Agile software methodology is widely used in software in- dustries due to its fexible and dynamic nature. In agile methodology, the project is developed in different iterations and there is a quick response to changes. The main methods of agile are XP, Scrum, DSDM, * Corresponding author. E-mail address: Shariq2315@gmail.com (S.A. Butt). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Advances in Engineering Software journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/advengsoft https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advengsoft.2022.103159 Received 10 April 2022; Received in revised form 23 May 2022; Accepted 26 May 2022