Accuracy Comparison of Analogy-Based Software Development Effort Estimation Techniques

Estimation by analogy is a commonly used software effort estimation technique and a suitable alternative to other conventional estimation techniques: It predicts the effort of the target project using information from former similar projects. While it is relatively easy to handle numerical attributes, dealing with categorical attributes is one of the most difficult issues for analogy-based estimation techniques. Therefore, we propose, in this paper, a novel analogy-based approach, called 2FA-kprototypes, to predict effort when software projects are described by a mix of numerical and categorical attributes. To this aim, the well-known fuzzy k-prototypes algorithm is integrated into the process of estimation by analogy. The estimation accuracy of 2FA-kprototypes was evaluated and compared with that of two techniques: (1) classical analogy-based technique and (2) 2FA-kmodes, which is a technique that we have developed recently. The comparison was performed using four data sets that are quite diverse and have different sizes: ISBSG, COCOMO, USP05-FT, and USP05-RQ. The results obtained showed that both 2FA-kprototypes and 2FA-kmodes perform better than classical analogy. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.