Computational Intelligence in Software Cost Estimation: Evolving Conditional Sets of Effort Value Ranges

نویسندگان

  • Efi Papatheocharous
  • Andreas S. Andreou
چکیده

In the area of software engineering a critical task is to accurately estimate the overall project costs for the completion of a new software project and efficiently allocate the resources throughout the project schedule. The numerous software cost estimation approaches proposed are closely related to cost modeling and recognize the increasing need for successful project management, planning and accurate cost prediction. Cost estimators are continually faced with problems stemming from the dynamic nature of the project development process itself. Software development is considered an intractable procedure and inevitably depends highly on several complex factors (e.g., specification of the system, technology shifting, communication, etc.). Normally, software cost estimates increase proportionally to development complexity rising, whereas it is especially hard to predict and manage the actual related costs. Even for well-structured and planned approaches to software development, cost estimates are still difficult to make and will probably concern project managers long before the problem is adequately solved. During a system’s life-cycle, one of the most important tasks is to effectively describe the necessary development activities and estimate the corresponding costs. This estimation, once successful, allows software engineers to optimize the development process, improve administration and control over the project resources, reduce the risks caused by contingencies and minimize project failures (Lederer & Prasad, 1992). Subsequently, a commonly investigated approach is to accurately estimate some of the fundamental characteristics related to cost, such as effort and schedule, and identify their interassociations. Software cost estimation is affected by multiple parameters related to technologies, scheduling, manager and team member skills and experiences, mentality and culture, team cohesion, productivity, project size, complexity, reliability, quality and many more. These parameters drive software development costs either positively or negatively and are considerably very hard to measure and manage, especially at an early project development phase. Hence, software cost estimation involves the overall assessment of these parameters, even though for the majority of the projects, the most dominant and popular metric is the effort cost, typically measured in person-months. Recent attempts have investigated the potential of employing Artificial Intelligence-oriented methods to forecast software development effort, usually utilising publicly available

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Bridging the semantic gap for software effort estimation by hierarchical feature selection techniques

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...

متن کامل

Evolving Software Effort Estimation Models Using Multigene Symbolic Regression Genetic Programming

Software has played an essential role in engineering, economic development, stock market growth and military applications. Mature software industry count on highly predictive software effort estimation models. Correct estimation of software effort lead to correct estimation of budget and development time. It also allows companies to develop appropriate time plan for marketing campaign. Now a da...

متن کامل

SEffEst: Effort estimation in software projects using fuzzy logic and neural networks

Academia and practitioners confirm that software project effort prediction is crucial for an accurate software project management. However, software development effort estimation is uncertain by nature. Literature has developed methods to improve estimation correctness, using artificial intelligence techniques in many cases. Following this path, this paper presents SEffEst, a framework based on...

متن کامل

A New Empirical Model to Increase the Accuracy of Software Cost Estimation (TECHNICAL NOTE)

We can say a software project is successful when it is delivered on time, within the budget and maintaining the required quality. However, nowadays software cost estimation is a critical issue for the advance software industry. As the modern software’s behaves dynamically so estimation of the effort and cost is significantly difficult. Since last 30 years, more than 20 models are already develo...

متن کامل

Improvement of effort estimation accuracy in software projects using a feature selection approach

In recent years, utilization of feature selection techniques has become an essential requirement for processing and model construction in different scientific areas. In the field of software project effort estimation, the need to apply dimensionality reduction and feature selection methods has become an inevitable demand. The high volumes of data, costs, and time necessary for gathering data , ...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2008