EffortEst- An Enhanced Software Effort Estimation by Analogy Method

Abstract: Over the past few years, large-scale software project development has become the point of growing interest to many organizations and thus, predicting the size, cost and effort of software projects has become a very significant task to project managers. Often inaccurate prediction results into software projects exceeding budget as well as being out of schedule. Therefore, software project managers have been introduced to numerous software tools and methods in recent years to automate their tasks. The paper presents some existing analogy-based software estimation tools used by project managers and these tools are critically analyzed to identify shortcomings. Finally an enhanced software effort estimation method is proposed. A system prototype named EffortEst has been implemented and evaluated based on the enhanced method. EffortEst provides the near-best estimation of software project effort with limited user intervention. Keywords: Software Effort Estimation, Analogy, Case- Based Reasoning, Prototype (Article history: Received 16 September 2016 and accepted 9 December 2016)