Machine Learning Application to Improve COCOMO Model using Neural Networks

Abstract

Millions of companies expend billions of dollars on trillions of software for the development and maintenance. Still many projects result in failure causing heavy financial loss. Major reason is the inefficient effort estimation techniques which are not so suitable for the current development methods. The continuous change in the software development technology makes effort estimation more challenging. Till date, no estimation method has been found full-proof to accurately pre-compute the time, money, effort (man-hours) and other resources required to successfully complete the project resulting either overestimated budget or underestimated budget. Here a machine learning COCOMO is proposed which is a novel non-algorithmic approach to effort estimation. This estimation technique performs well within their pre-specified domains and beyond so. As development methods have undergone revolutionaries but estimation techniques are not so modified to cope up with the modern development skills, so the need of training the models to work with updated development methods is being satiated just by finding out the patterns and associations among the domain specific data sets via neural networks along with carriage of desired COCOMO features. This paper estimates the effort by training proposed neural network using already published data-set and later on, the testing is done. The validation clearly shows that the performance of algorithmic method is improved by the proposed machine learning method.