Estimating software maintenance effort: a neural network approach

  • Authors:

  • Ruchi Shukla;Arun Kumar Misra

  • Affiliations:

  • Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India;Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India

  • Venue:
  • ISEC '08 Proceedings of the 1st India software engineering conference
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Software maintenance forms an essential component of software development. Its planning includes estimation of maintenance effort, duration, personnel and costs. Adequate information regarding size, complexity and maintainability is however often unavailable. In the present work, a Neural Network (NN) based effort estimator is developed using Matlab. A feed forward back- propagation NN employing Bayesian regularization training is selected and trained for one dataset. Various categories of software maintenance cost drivers and their effect on maintenance effort have been analyzed using different combinations of number of hidden layers and hidden neurons etc. The NN is able to successfully model the maintenance effort as the obtained results are well within the previously published error limits