Soft Computing Based Technique for Accurate Effort Estimation: A Survey

The global software market has grown exponentially over the past decade. The cost of developing software has grown significantly. The main reason attributed to this increasing trend in the software costs is the labor intensive nature of the software development process. To effectively manage software projects it is important to have accurate estimates of cost and effort involved in software development. The number of project failures and the cases of cost and schedule overrun have been a significant issue for software project managers. Poor estimates have not only led projects to exceed budget and go overscheduled but also in many cases to be terminated entirely. Software cost estimation is the set of techniques and procedures that organizations use to arrive at an estimate for proposal bidding, project planning and probability estimates. Accurate estimate means better planning and efficient use of project resources such as cost, duration and effort requirements for software projects. Efficient software development effort estimation is one of the most demanding tasks in software industry. Unfortunately software industry suffers from the problem of inaccurate estimate for projects and in many cases inability to set correct release date, leads to low quality of delivered product. In this paper we have explored and analyzed different soft computing based techniques employed for software effort estimation based on COCOMO model(Boehm B.).