Good points. You’re right that the paper doesn’t compare EBS to other alternatives. I tried to focus on how well EBS might fit into any arbitrary organization. As for how EBS handles being wrong… In theory, it self-adjusts for future projects but does nothing for the current project. Here’s a place that I disagree with Joel. He says in his articles that a block of padding is added to the project to account for stuff like this. I think this is too loose an approach.

the paper seems ok as far as a review of EBS goes, but doesn’t put EBS into context alongside other alternatives used for traditional plan-based software development. Also, I just skimmed this, but there didn’t seem to be evidence about how well it stood up to other solutions on offer, which would be interesting to see. Lastly, what happens when the estimate is wrong? Sorry, couldn’t resist, as tend toward agile, lean and evo approaches in this stuff.