An Approach towards Developing an Efficient Software Cost Estimation System Using Fuzzy and Analogy Methods

––Software development cost estimation is important for effective project management. Many models have been introduced to predict software development cost. In this paper, a novel emotional COnstructive Cost MOdel II (COCOMO II) has been proposed for software cost estimation. In COCOMO II only the project characteristics are considered, whereas the characteristics of team members are also important factors. Hence our proposed method is effectively estimated the software effort and the cost by employing analogy with fuzzy based methods. In order to overcome all these difficulties of existing systems, in the software cost estimation process, we proposed an efficient software cost estimation system based on fuzzy analogy. In this, we have developed and validated a set of candidate measures for software projects similarity. These measures are based on fuzzy sets, fuzzy reasoning and linguistic quantifiers. A new approach to estimate effort by analogy when software projects are described either by numerical or categorical data. The normal procedure for analogy is not applicable for categorical data. So a new approach which can be seen as a Fuzzification of the classical approach of estimation by analogy. The proposed method will applicable to Function Point Metric also. It easy to generate rules in fuzzy analogy method. The fuzzy analogy based cost estimation will overcome the multi co-linearity problem. The effort can be estimated based on the emotional characteristics of the employees in the projects. The neuroticism characters highly affect the performance of the cost estimation system. Thus our proposed method will give better performance when compared to these recent papers. Our method will overcome all the drawbacks of these previous methods.