Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Buying time in software development: how estimates become commitments?   Despite years of research for improving accuracy, software practitioners
still face software estimation difficulties. Expert judgment has been the
prevalent method used in industry, and researchers' focus on raising realism in
estimates when using it seems not to be enough for the much-expected
improvements. Instead of focusing on the estimation process's technicalities,
we investigated the interaction of the establishment of commitments with
customers and software estimation. By observing estimation sessions and
interviewing software professionals from companies in varying contexts, we
found that defensible estimates and padding of software estimates are crucial
in converting estimates into commitments. Our findings show that software
professionals use padding for three different reasons: contingency buffer,
completing other tasks, or improving the overall quality of the product. The
reasons to pad have a common theme: buying time to balance short- and long-term
software development commitments, including the repayment of technical debt.
Such a theme emerged from the human aspects of the interaction of estimation
and the establishment of commitments: pressures and customers' conflicting
short and long-term needs play silent and unrevealed roles in-between the
technical activities. Therefore, our study contributes to untangling the
underlying phenomena, showing how the practices used by software practitioners
help to deal with the human and social context in which estimation is embedded.

35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
2
The categories of this paper are: math
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
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The categories of this paper are: stat
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int
5
The categories of this paper are: gr-qc
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The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph