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Context: Software projects frequently incur schedule and budget overruns. Planning and estimation are particularly challenging in large and globally distributed agile projects. While software engineering researchers have been investigating effort estimation for many years to help practitioners to improve their estimation processes, there is little empirical research about effort estimation in large-scale distributed projects involving agile teams.

Objective: The objective of this paper is three-fold: i) To identify how effort estimation is carried out in large-scale distributed agile projects; ii) to analyze the accuracy of the effort estimation processes in large-scale distributed agile projects; and iii) to identify and investigate the factors that impact the accuracy of effort estimates in large-scale distributed agile projects.

Method: We performed an exploratory longitudinal case study. The data collection was operationalized through …