Software Effort Estimation Inspired by COCOMO and FP Models: A Fuzzy Logic Approach

Budgeting, bidding and planning of software project effort, time and cost are essential elements of any software development process. Massive size and complexity of now a day produced software systems cause a substantial risk for the development process. Inadequate and inefficient information about the size and complexity results in an ambiguous estimates that cause many losses. Project managers cannot adequately provide good estimate for both the effort and time needed. Thus, no clear release day to the market can be defined. This paper presents two new models for software effort estimation using fuzzy logic. One model is developed based on the famous COnstructive COst Model (COCOMO) and utilizes the Source Line Of Code (SLOC) as input variable to estimate the Effort (E); while the second model utilize the Inputs, Outputs, Files, and User Inquiries to estimate the Function Point (FP). The proposed fuzzy models show better estimation capabilities compared to other reported models in the literature and better assist the project manager in computing the software required development effort. The validation results are carried out using Albrecht data set.