A Novel Method based on the Cocomo model to increase the accuracy of software projects effort estimates

It is regarded as a crucial task in a software project to estimate the criteria, and effort estimation in the primary stages of software development is thus one of the most important challenges involved in management of software projects. Incorrect estimation can lead the project to failure. It is therefore a major task in efficient development of software projects to estimate software costs accurately. Therefore, two methods were presented in this research for effort estimation in software projects, where attempts were made to provide a way to increase accuracy through analysis of stimuli and application of metaheuristic algorithms in combination with neural networks. The first method examined the effect of the cuckoo search algorithm in optimization of the estimation coefficients in the COCOMO model, and the second method was presented as a combination of neural networks and the cuckoo search optimization algorithm to increase the accuracy of effort estimation in software development. The results obtained on two real-world datasets demonstrated the proper efficiency of the proposed methods as compared to that of similar methods.