Software Effort Estimation Inspired by COCOMO and FP Models: A Fuzzy Logic Approach

Abstract

Budgeting, bidding and planning of software projecteffort, time and cost are essential elements of anysoftware development process. Massive size andcomplexity of now a day produced software systems causea substantial risk for the development process.Inadequate and inefficient information about the sizeand complexity results in an ambiguous estimates thatcause many losses. Project managers cannot adequatelyprovide good estimate for both the effort and timeneeded. Thus, no clear release day to the market can bedefined. This paper presents two new models forsoftware effort estimation using fuzzy logic. One modelis developed based on the famous COnstructive COstModel (COCOMO) and utilizes the Source Line Of Code(SLOC) as input variable to estimate the Effort (E);while the second model utilize the Inputs, Outputs,Files, and User Inquiries to estimate the FunctionPoint (FP). The proposed fuzzy models show betterestimation capabilities compared to other reportedmodels in the literature and better assist the projectmanager in computing the software required developmenteffort. The validation results are carried out usingAlbrecht data set.