Software Effort Estimation in Rapidly Changing Computng Environment

Since the computing environment changes very rapidly, the estimation of software effort is very difficult because it is not easy to collect a sufficient number of relevant cases from the historical data. If we pinpoint the cases, the number of cases becomes too small. However is we adopt too many cases, the relevance declines. So in this paper we attempt to balance the number of cases and relevance. Since many researches on software effort estimation showed that the neural network models perform at least as well as the other approaches, so we selected the neural network model as the basic estimator. We propose a search method that finds the right level of relevant cases for the neural network model. For the selected case set. eliminating the qualitative input factors with the same values can reduce the scale of the neural network model. Since there exists a multitude of combinations of case sets, we need to search for the optimal reduced neural network model and corresponding case, set. To find the quasi-optimal model from the hierarchy of reduced neural network models, we adopted the beam search technique and devised the Case-Set Selection Algorithm. This algorithm can be adopted in the case-adaptive software effort estimation systems.