An Improved COCOMO based Model to Estimate the Effort of Software Projects

One of important aspects of software projects is estimating the cost and time required to develop projects. Nowadays, this issue has become one of the key concerns of project managers. Accurate estimation of essential effort to produce and develop software is heavily effective on success or failure of software projects and it is highly regarded as a vital factor. Failure to achieve convincing accuracy and little flexibility of current models in this field have attracted the attention of researchers in the last few years. Despite improvements to estimate effort, no agreement was obtained to select estimation model as the best one. One of effort estimation methods which is highly regarded is COCOMO. It is an extremely appropriate method to estimate effort. Although COCOMO was invented many years ago, it enjoys the effort estimation capability in software projects. Researchers have always attempted to improve the effort estimation capability in COCOMO through improving its structure. However, COCOMO results are not always satisfactory. The present study introduces a hybrid model for increasing the accuracy of COCOMO estimation. Combining bee colony algorithm with COCOMO estimation method, the proposed method obtained more efficient coefficient relative to the basic mode of COCOMO. Selecting the best coefficients maximizes the efficiency of the proposed method. The simulation results revealed the superiority of the proposed model based on MMRE and PRED(0.15).

Keywords:

COCOMO 81 , effort estimation , development effort , software projects