Software Development Effort Duration and Cost Estimation using Linear Regression and K-Nearest Neighbors Machine Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Effort estimation is a crucial step that leads to Duration estimation and cost estimation in software development. Estimations done in the initial stage of projects are based on requirements that may lead to success or failure of the project. Accurate estimations lead to success and inaccurate estimates lead to failure. There is no one particular method which cloud do accurate estimations. In this work, we propose Machine learning techniques linear regression and K-nearest Neighbors to predict Software Effort estimation using COCOMO81, COCOMONasa, and COCOMONasa2 datasets. The results obtained from these two methods have been compared. The 80% data in data sets used for training and remaining used as the test set. The correlation coefficient, Mean squared error (MSE) and Mean magnitude relative error (MMRE) are used as performance metrics. The experimental results show that these models forecast the software effort accurately.