The Application of Case-Based Reasoning to Estimation of Software Development Effort

Accurate project effort estimation is an important goal for the software engineering community. Till date most work has focused upon building algorithmic models of effort estimation for example COCOMO. We describe an alternative approach to estimation based upon the use of analogy. The objective is to estimate the development effort of student programs based on the values of certain attributes. We have developed a case based reasoning model and have validated it upon student data. Due to the nature of the software engineering domain, it is important that software cost estimation models should be able to deal with imprecision and uncertainty associated with such values. It is to serve this purpose that we propose our case based model for software cost estimation. We feel that case based models are particularly useful when it is difficult to define concrete rules about a problem domain in addition to this, expert advice may be used to supplement the existing stored knowledge.