A NEW MODEL FOR SOFTWARE COSTESTIMATION
USING HARMONY SEARCH
International Journal on Foundations of Computer Science & Technology (IJFCST), 5 (3):
9 (May 2015)DOI: 10.5121/ijfcst.2015.5304
Abstract
Accurate and realistic estimation is always considered to be a great challenge in software industry.
Software Cost Estimation (SCE) is the standard application used to manage software projects. Determining
the amount of estimation in the initial stages of the project depends on planning other activities of the
project. In fact, the estimation is confronted with a number of uncertainties and barriers’, yet assessing the
previous projects is essential to solve this problem. Several models have been developed for the analysis of
software projects. But the classical reference method is the COCOMO model, there are other methods
which are also applied such as Function Point (FP), Line of Code(LOC); meanwhile, the expert`s opinions
matter in this regard. In recent years, the growth and the combination of meta-heuristic algorithms with
high accuracy have brought about a great achievement in software engineering. Meta-heuristic algorithms
which can analyze data from multiple dimensions and identify the optimum solution between them are
analytical tools for the analysis of data. In this paper, we have used the Harmony Search (HS)algorithm for
SCE. The proposed model which is a collection of 60 standard projects from Dataset NASA60 has been
assessed.The experimental results show that HS algorithm is a good way for determining the weight
similarity measures factors of software effort, and reducing the error of MRE.