Tuning of Cost Drivers by Significance Occurrences and Their Calibration with Novel Software Effort Estimation Method

Abstract

Estimation is an important part of software engineering projects, and the ability to produce accurate effort estimates has an impact on key economic processes, including budgeting and bid proposals and deciding the execution boundaries of the project. Work in this paper explores the interrelationship among different dimensions of software projects, namely, project size, effort, and effort influencing factors. The study aims at providing better effort estimate on the parameters of modified COCOMO along with the detailed use of binary genetic algorithm as a novel optimization algorithm. Significance of 15 cost drivers can be shown by their impact on MMRE of efforts on original 63 NASA datasets. Proposed method is producing tuned values of the cost drivers, which are effective enough to improve the productivity of the projects. Prediction at different levels of MRE for each project reflects the percentage of projects with desired accuracy. Furthermore, this model is validated on two different datasets which represents better estimation accuracy as compared to the COCOMO 81 based NASA 63 and NASA 93 datasets.