Industrial practitioners now face a bewildering array of possible configurations for effort estimation. How to select the best one for a particular dataset? This paper introduces OIL (short for optimized learning), a novel configuration tool for effort estimation based on differential evolution. When tested on 945 software projects, OIL significantly improved effort estimations, after exploring...

One of the greatest challenges for software developers is forecasting the development effort for a software system for the last decades. The capability to provide a good estimation on software development efforts is necessitated by the project managers. Software effort estimation models divided into two main categories: algorithmic and nonalgorithmic. These models too have difficulty in modelli...

Effort estimation is the first of many steps in the software development process that can lead to a successful project’s completion. It is a complex task, that constitutes the basis for all subsequent steps related to planing and management. Effort estimation is also a very important part in agile software development projects. In order to achieve the highest possible levels of accuracy, softwa...

Software project management is one of the significant activates in the software development process. Software Development Effort Estimation (SDEE) is a challenging task in the software project management. SDEE is an old activity in computer industry from 1940s and has been reviewed several times. A SDEE model is appropriate if it provides the accuracy and confidence simultaneously before softwa...

The unresolved problems of improving software engineering management require a broader systemic approach of investigating related issues like software development productivity. The paper links software engineering management to research on software cost estimation and on factors affecting software development productivity. It examines ways for the systemic incorporation of all issues influencin...

ABSTRACT—Software Engineering plays a vital role in software development process. Software effort Estimation usually takes place in early stage of software life cycle. Estimation relies upon previous experience. Software development based on accurate estimates because badly chosen estimate causes problems during the performance of software development process. A linear Regression model with exp...

Existing algorithmic models fail to produce accurate software development effort estimates. To address this problem, a case-based reasoning model, called Estor, was developed based on the verbal protocols of a human expert solving a set of estimation problems. Estor was then presented with 15 software effort estimation tasks. The estimates of Estor were compared to those of the expert as well a...

-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...

This paper examines how a team of software professionals goes about estimating the effort of a software project using a judgment-based, bottom-up estimation approach. By employing a social practice perspective that highlights the distributed character of expertise and conceives actions as mediated by cultural tools, the paper analyzes the interactional process through which the estimation tasks...

Software effort estimates is an important part of software development work and provides essential input to project feasibility analyses, bidding, budgeting and planning. Analogy-based estimates models emerge as a promising approach, with comparable accuracy to arithmetic methods, and it is potentially easier to understand and apply. Studies show all the models are sensitive to the quality and ...