Effective ANN Model based on Neuro-Evolution Mechanism for Realistic Software Estimates in the Early Phase of Software Development

Abstract

There is no doubt that the software industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors on the planet today. As the cost of the entire development process continues to rise, an effective mechanism is needed to estimate the required development cost to control better the cost overrun problem and make the final software product more competitive. However, in the early stages of planning, the project managers have difficulty estimating the realistic value of the effort and cost required to execute development activities. Software evaluation prior to development can minimize risk and upsurge project success rates. Many techniques have been suggested and employed for cost estimation. However, computations based on several of these techniques show that the estimation of development effort and cost vary, which may cause problems for software industries in allocating overall resources costs. The proposed research study proposes the artificial neural network (ANN) based Neural-Evolution technique to provide more realistic software estimates in the early stages of development. The proposed model uses the advantages of the topology augmentation using an evolutionary algorithm to automate and achieve optimality in ANN construction and training. Based on the results and performance analysis, it is observed that software effort prediction using the proposed approach is more accurate and better than other existing approaches.