Software Development Effort Estimation Based on a New Fuzzy Logic Model

Abstract

Software developing has always been characterised by some metrics. In this area, one of the greatest challenges for software developers is predicting the development effort for a software system based on developer abilities, size, complexity and other metrics for the last decades. The ability to give a good estimation on software development efforts is required by the project managers. Most of the traditional techniques such as function points, regression models, COCOMO, etc, require a long-term estimation process. New paradigms as Fuzzy Logic may offer an alternative for this challenge. Many of the problems of the existing effort estimation models can be solved by incorporating Fuzzy Logic. This paper described an enhanced Fuzzy Logic model for the estimation of software development effort and proposed a new approach by applying Fuzzy Logic for software effort estimates. Results show that the value of MMRE (Mean of Magnitude of Relative Error) applying Fuzzy Logic was substantially lower than MMRE applying by other Fuzzy Logic models.