Estimating maintenance effort by analogy

Abstract

Effort estimation is a key step of any software project. This paper presents a method to estimate project effort using an improved version of analogy. Unlike estimation methods based on case-based reasoning, our method makes use of two nearest neighbors of the target project for estimation. An additional refinement based on the relative location of the target project is then applied to generate the effort estimate. We first identify the relationships between cost drivers and project effort, and then determine the number of past project data that should be used in the estimation to provide the best result. Our method is then applied to a set of maintenance projects. Based on a comparison of the estimation results from our estimation method and those of other estimation methods, we conclude that our method can provide more accurate results.