What is Software Cost Estimation

Software development has become an essential investment for many organizations. Software engineering practitioners have become more and more concerned about accurately predicting the cost of software products to be developed. Accurate estimates are desired but no model has proved to be successful at effectively and consistently predicting software development cost. This chapter investigates the use of the soft computing approaches in predicting the software development effort. Various statistical and intelligent techniques are employed to estimate software development effort. Further, based on the abovementioned techniques, ensemble models are developed to forecast software development effort. Two types of ensemble models viz., linear (average) and nonlinear are designed and tested on COCOMO’81 dataset. Based on the experiments performed on the COCOMO’81 data, it was observed that the nonlinear ensemble using radial basis function network as arbitrator outperformed all the other ensembles and also the constituent statistical and intelligent techniques. The authors conclude that using soft computing models they can accurately estimate software development effort.