The International Arab Journal of Information Technology (IAJIT)

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An Effective Approach to Software Cost Estimation

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  Employing estimation models in software engineering help in envisaging some essential traits of future entities like software development effort, software reliability a nd programmers productivity. Of these models, the o ne that supports the estimation of software effort has drawn substantial attention currently to carry out researches. Estimation by analogy is one among the interesting techniques used for estimatin g the software effort. But, the process of estimating by analogy is unable to handle categorical data accurately. A novel techniq ue that relies on reasoning by analogy, fuzzy logic and linguistic quantifiers is being proposed here for estimating e ffort, provided that the software project is represented either by categorical or numerical data. Use of fuzzy logic,based cost es timation models is more suitable if unclear or inaccurate information are considered. Fuzzy systems attempt to imitate the pr ocesses of the brain through a rule base. The propo sed method utilizes Fuzzy logic based analogy approach to estimate the cost and the effort. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme is made using Mean Absolute Relative Error (MARE) and Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE) which is va lidated with other existing techniques.