A New Model for Software Costestimation Using Harmony Search

Accurate and realistic estimation is always considered to be a great challenge in software industry. Software Cost Estimation (SCE) is the standard application used to manage software projects. Determining the amount of estimation in the initial stages of the project depends on planning other activities of the project. In fact, the estimation is confronted with a number of uncertainties and barriers’, yet assessing the previous projects is essential to solve this problem. Several models have been developed for the analysis of software projects. But the classical reference method is the COCOMO model, there are other methods which are also applied such as Function Point (FP), Line of Code(LOC); meanwhile, the expert`s opinions matter in this regard. In recent years, the growth and the combination of meta-heuristic algorithms with high accuracy have brought about a great achievement in software engineering. Meta-heuristic algorithms which can analyze data from multiple dimensions and identify the optimum solution between them are analytical tools for the analysis of data. In this paper, we have used the Harmony Search (HS)algorithm for SCE. The proposed model which is a collection of 60 standard projects from Dataset NASA60 has been assessed.The experimental results show that HS algorithm is a good way for determining the weight similarity measures factors of software effort, and reducing the error of MRE.