Multi-objective software effort estimation

Abstract

We introduce a bi-objective effort estimation algorithm that combines Confidence Interval Analysis and assessment of Mean Absolute Error. We evaluate our proposed algorithm on three different alternative formulations, baseline comparators and current state-of-the-art effort estimators applied to five real-world datasets from the PROMISE repository, involving 724 different software projects in total. The results reveal that our algorithm outperforms the baseline, state-of-the-art and all three alternative formulations, statistically significantly (p < 0.001) and with large effect size (Â12 ≥ 0.9) over all five datasets. We also provide evidence that our algorithm creates a new state-of-the-art, which lies within currently claimed industrial human-expert-based thresholds, thereby demonstrating that our findings have actionable conclusions for practicing software engineers.