A Review on Software Cost Estimation Based on Machine Learning

Software project management software is the most important activity in software development, because it contains the whole software development process, from beginning to end. Software cost estimation is a challenge task in the software project management. It is an old activity in computer industry from 1940s and has been developed many times. Effort, only covers part of the cost of a software project. However, it is an essential factor for determining the cost. Therefore, in researches on software cost estimates, effort estimation and cost estimation are equivalent. A Software cost estimation model is appropriate if provides the accuracy and confidence simultaneously in cost prediction before software project contract. Due to the uncertain nature of cost estimates and in order to increase the accuracy, researchers recently have focused on machine learning techniques. In this paper, we investigated the software cost estimation by machine learning approaches, also, we introduced estimation methods, criterias to assess the accuracy of proposed methods, used datasets for evaluation, and future works in this research area.