A Review of Machine Learning Models for Software Cost Estimation

Software cost estimation is a critical task in software projects development. It assists project managers and software engineers to plan and manage their resources. However, developing an accurate cost estimation model for a software project is a challenging process. The aim of such a process is to have a better future sight of the project progress and its phases. Another main objective is to have clear project details and specifications to assist stakeholders in managing the project in terms of human resources, assets, software, data and even in the feasibility study. Accurate estimation results with definitely helps the project manager to do better estimation for the project cost, the time required for various project phases and resources or assets. This paper builds a software cost estimation model using machine learning approach. Different machine learning algorithms are applied to two public datasets to predict the software cost in the early stages. Results show that machine learning methods can be used to predict software cost with a high accuracy rate.