SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT CHANGE EFFORT ESTIMATION MODEL PROTOTYPE TOOL FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PHASE

Abstract

In software development phase software artifacts are not in consistent states such as: some of the class artifacts are fully developed some are half developed, some are major developed, some are minor developed and some are not developed yet. At this stage allowing too many software requirement changes may possibly delay in project delivery and increase development budget of the software. On the other hand rejecting too many changes may increase customer dissatisfaction. Software change effort estimation is one of the most challenging and important activity that helps software project managers in accepting or rejecting changes during software development phase. This paper extends our previous works on developing a software requirement change effort estimation model prototype tool for the software development phase. The significant achievements of the tool are demonstrated through an extensive experimental validation using several case studies. The experimental analysis shows improvement in the estimation accuracy over current change effort estimation models.