An effective approach to software cost estimation based on soft computing techniques

Employing estimation models in software engineering help in envisaging some essential traits of future entities like software development effort, software reliability and programmers productivity. Of these models, the one that supports the estimation of software effort has drawn substantial attention currently to carry out researches. Estimation by analogy is one among the interesting techniques used for estimating the software effort. But, the process of estimating by analogy is unable to handle categorical data accurately. A novel technique that relies on reasoning by analogy, fuzzy logic and linguistic quantifiers is being proposed here for estimating effort, provided that the software project is represented either by categorical or numerical data. Use of fuzzy logic-based cost estimation models is more suitable if unclear or inaccurate information are considered. Fuzzy systems attempt to imitate the processes of the brain through a rule base. The proposed method utilizes Fuzzy logic based analogy approach to estimate the cost and the effort. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme is made using Mean Absolute Relative Error (MARE) and Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE) which is validated with other existing techniques.