Software Development Cost and Time Forecasting Using a High Performance Artificial Neural Network Model

Abstract

Nowadays, mature software companies are more interested to have a precise estimation of software metrics such as project time, cost, quality, and risk at the early stages of software development process. The ability to precisely estimate project time and costs by project managers is one of the essential tasks in software development activities, and it named software effort estimation. The estimated effort at the early stage of project development process is uncertain, vague, and often the least accurate. It is because that very little information is available at the beginning stage of project. Therefore, a reliable and precise effort estimation model is an ongoing challenge for project managers and software engineers. This research work proposes a novel soft computing model incorporating Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO) to improve the precision of software time and cost estimation. The proposed artificial neural network model has good generalisation, adaption capability, and it can be interpreted and validated by software engineers. The experimental results show that applying the desirable features of artificial neural networks on the algorithmic estimation model improves the accuracy of time and cost estimation and estimated effort can be very close to the actual effort.