Hybrid PSO-SA approach for feature weighting in analogy-based software project effort estimation

Software effort estimation plays an important role in software project management, and analogy-based estimation (ABE) is the most common method used for this purpose. ABE estimates the effort required for a new software project based on its similarity to previous projects. A similarity between the projects is evaluated based on a set of project features, each of which has a particular effect on the degree of similarity between projects and the effort feature. The present study examines the hybrid PSO-SA approach for feature weighting in analogy-based software project effort estimation. The proposed approach was implemented and tested on two well-known datasets of software projects. The performance of the proposed model was compared with other optimization algorithms based on MMRE, MDMRE, and PRED(0.25) measures. The results showed that weighted ABE models provide more accurate and better effort estimates relative to unweighted ABE models and that the PSO-SA hybrid approach has led to better and more accurate results compared with the other weighting approaches in both datasets.