Software cost estimation is a key open issue for the software industry, which suffers from cost overruns frequently. As the most popular technique for object-oriented software cost estimation is Use Case Points (UCP) method, however, it has two major drawbacks: the uncertainty of the cost factors and the abrupt classification. To address these two issues, refined the use case complexity classif...

Culture and leadership factors play an important role in software development and cost estimation. We discuss the many dimensions of culture and leadership and their impact on cost estimation in software development. We conducted a survey to identify leadership and cultural factors that may influence the software development process and its associated cost. A cost estimation model incorporating...

Calibration, has been .found to be difficult in practice. Wide experience in using the estimation model is necessary; experience which the beginner naturally lacks. This paper indicates why it is important to calibrate a model and how the inexperienced user can be helped by an expert system. In addition, the development of, and experience with, the prototype of an expert system are described. T...

Expert judgment for software effort estimation is oriented toward direct evidences that refer to actual effort of similar projects or activities through experts’ experiences. However, the availability of direct evidences implies the requirement of suitable experts together with past data. The circumstantial-evidence-based judgment proposed in this paper focuses on the development experiences de...

Many cost estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades. In this study, we investigate fuzzy ID3 decision tree as a method for software effort estimation. Fuzzy ID software effort estimation model is designed by incorporating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the concepts of the fuzzy settheoretic; permitting the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when present...

There is an increasing interest in acquiring commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) functionality for safety-critical applications. However, the selection of COTS products for such applications is still carried out in an ad hoc manner. This creates great difficulties for realistic cost and effort estimation, integration of the selected COTS product, and the certification of final COTS-based safetycrit...

The paper aims to provide for the improvement of software estimation research through a new regression model. The study design of the paper is organized as follows. Evaluation of estimation methods based on historical data sets requires that these data sets be representative for current or future projects. For that reason the data set for software cost estimation model the International Softwar...

The objective of Empirical Software Engineering is to improve the software development and maintenance processes and consequently the quality of theirs various deliverables. This can be achieved by evaluating, controlling and predicting some important attributes of software projects such as development effort, software reliability, and programmers productivity. One of the most interesting sub-f...

One of the most important tasks for IT professionals is software development cost estimation. This critical task affects the firm's software investment decisions before bidding for a contract or committing required resources to that project. Under-estimation may lead to unexpected increase in budget, delay of project completion or its low quality, while over-estimation may lead to losing busine...

As software cost drivers are fuzzy and uncertain, software cost estimates are prone to a certain degree of estimation errors especially in their early stages of software development life cycle. However, most of the existing software cost estimation models in present literature only generate a single point estimate and do not explicitly reveal the degree of risks caused by their inaccuracies. Th...