The growing complexity and number of software projects requires both increasingly more experienced developers, testers and other specialists as well as a larger number of persons to fill these roles. This leads to increased personnel and management costs and also makes effort and cost estimation at task and activity levels more difficult for software development companies. An automated solution for software development effort estimation based on text descriptions of tasks and activities, combined with available metrics, is introduced. A real world case study consisting of data from a software company whose activity spans a rich development spectrum is conducted. The results obtained are very encouraging and surpass the few similar approaches available in research literature.