Software Cost Estimation can be described as the process of predicting the most realistic effort required to complete a software project. Due to the strong relationship of accurate effort estimations with many crucial project management activities, the research community has been focused on the development and application of a vast variety of methods and models trying to improve the estimation ...

Software effort estimation is a critical part of software engineering. Although many techniques and algorithmic models have been developed and implemented by practitioners, accurate software effort prediction is still a challenging endeavor. In order to address this issue, a novel soft computing framework was previously developed. Our study utilizes this novel framework to develop an approach c...

Software projects often do not meet their scheduling and budgeting targets. Inaccurate estimates are often responsible for this mismatch. This study investigates extant research on factors that affect accuracy of software development effort estimation. The purpose is to synthesize existing knowledge, propose directions for future research, and improve estimation accuracy in practice. A systemat...

This paper exemplifies how better knowledge about human judgement strategies known as heuristics can be used to improve software processes, especially estimation and prediction processes. Human judgement heuristics work well when they exploit a fit between their structure and the structure of the environment in which they are used. This use of environmental fit may lead to amazingly good judgem...

Software cost estimation is known to be a challenging task at best, and these challenges are increased for programmers operating outside the support of an established team programming environment. While many software cost estimation models exist with varying levels of support, the nature of metrics collected for these models is seldom applicable to the solitary programmer. In addition, the work...

A cornerstone of software project management is effort estimation, the process by which effort is forecasted and used as basis to predict costs and allocate resources effectively, so enabling projects to be delivered on time and within budget. Effort estimation is a very complex domain where the relationship between factors is non-deterministic and has an inherently uncertain nature, and where ...

Software Effort Estimation (SEE) is one of the main activities in development of the software projects. Effort estimation in primary stages of development of the software is one of the important challenges the software projects manager faces. One of the common models of SEE is the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) model. In this model, the effort for development of the software projects is a fun...

Software effort estimation is still a significant challenge for software management. Although Functional Size Measurement (FSM) methods have been standardized and have become widely used by the software organizations, the relationship between functional size and development effort still needs further investigation. Most of the studies focus on the project cost drivers and consider total softwar...

Background: Analogy-Based Effort Estimation (ABE) is one of the efficient methods for software effort estimation because of its outstanding performance and capability of handling noisy datasets. Problem & Objective: Conventional ABE models usually use the same number of analogies for all projects in the datasets in order to make good estimates. Our claim is that using same number of analogies m...

-In software industry Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) is considered to be the most widely used model for effort estimation. Cost drivers have significant influence on the COCOMO and this research investigates the role of cost drivers in improving the precision of effort estimation. It is important to stress that uncertainty at the input level of the COCOMO yields uncertainty at the output, whi...