scholarly journals Investigating the Use of an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System in Software Development Effort Estimation

Author(s):  
Zainab Rustum Mohsin

Modeling software development effort estimation models has been a hot research topic over the last three decades. Numerous models were proposed in these decades to predict the effort. The key challenges for future software development is providing accurate software estimation. Failure to acknowledge the accuracy of effort estimation can cause inaccurate estimation, customer disappointment, and poor software development or project failure. This research presents a novel computational technique, named adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), for the modeling of software effort estimation. It was developed utilizing the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) dataset. The data were randomly divided into two sets: 83% for training and 17% for testing. The mean magnitude relative-error (MMRE) and the coefficient of correlation (R) were used as assessment indices. Results showed that the accuracy of the proposed model is quite satisfactory in comparison with actual values. Moreover, a comparison study was conducted with another approach. The results showed that ANFIS produced better results in comparison with Function Point Analysis, Software Lifecycle Management, and COCOMO methods. ANFIS was found to be a potential predictive model for software development effort estimation.

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 39-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Hassani Saadi ◽  
Vahid Khatibi Bardsiri ◽  
Fahimeh Ziaaddini

One of the major activities in effective and efficient production of software projects is the precise estimation of software development effort. Estimation of the effort in primary steps of software development is one of the most important challenges in managing software projects. Some reasons for these challenges such as: discordant software projects, the complexity of the manufacturing process, special role of human and high level of obscure and unusual features of software projects can be noted. Predicting the necessary efforts to develop software using meta-heuristic optimization algorithms has made significant progressions in this field. These algorithms have the potent to be used in estimation of the effort of the software. The necessity to increase estimation precision urged the authors to survey the efficiency of some meta-heuristic optimization algorithms and their effects on the software projects. To do so, in this paper, they investigated the effect of combining various optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization algorithm and ant colony algorithm on different models such as COCOMO, estimation based on analogy, machine learning methods and standard estimation models. These models have employed various data sets to evaluate the results such as COCOMO, Desharnais, NASA, Kemerer, CF, DPS, ISBSG and Koten & Gary. The results of this survey can be used by researchers as a primary reference.


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