Estimation of the COCOMO Model Parameters Using Genetic Algorithms for NASA Software Projects

Abstract

Defining the project estimated cost, duration and maintenance effort early in the development life cycle is a valuable goal to be achieved for software projects. Many model structures evolved in the literature. These model structures consider modeling software effort as a function of the developed line of code (DLOC). Building such a function helps project managers to accurately allocate the available resources for the project. In this study, we present two new model structures to estimate the effort required for the development of software projects using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). A modified version of the famous COCOMO model provided to explore the effect of the software development adopted methodology in effort computation. The performance of the developed models were tested on NASA software project dataset^[1]. The developed models were able to provide a good estimation capabilities.