Function Points in the Estimation and Evaluation of the Software Process
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Method to estimate parameter values in software prediction models
Information and Software Technology - Information and software economics
Reliability of function points measurement: a field experiment
Communications of the ACM
Robust regression for developing software estimation models
Journal of Systems and Software
Robust estimation in software experiments
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Software Engineering Economics
Software Engineering Economics
Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II with Cdrom
Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II with Cdrom
Empirical Software Engineering
An Investigation of Analysis Techniques for Software Datasets
METRICS '99 Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Software Metrics
A Simulation Study of the Model Evaluation Criterion MMRE
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Systematic Review of Software Development Cost Estimation Studies
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Replicating studies on cross- vs single-company effort models using the ISBSG Database
Empirical Software Engineering
Comparing cost prediction models by resampling techniques
Journal of Systems and Software
A constrained regression technique for cocomo calibration
Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
Comparing Software Cost Prediction Models by a Visualization Tool
SEAA '08 Proceedings of the 2008 34th Euromicro Conference Software Engineering and Advanced Applications
Visual comparison of software cost estimation models by regression error characteristic analysis
Journal of Systems and Software
Journal of Systems and Software
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Background: The relation between software effort and size has been modeled in literature as exponential, in the sense that the natural logarithm of effort is expressed as a linear function of the logarithm of size. The common approach to estimate the parameters of the linear model is ordinary least squares regression which has been extensively applied to various datasets. The least squares estimation takes into account only the error arising from the dependent variable (effort), while the measurement of independent variable (size) is considered free of errors. Aims: The basis of the study is that in practice the assumption of measuring the size without error is hardly true, since the size of a software project depends on the precision of the tool of measurement and often by the subjectivity of the rater. Moreover, the sizes of projects comprising a dataset have been measured by different measurement tools and this adds another source of variability in the independent variable. Method: In this paper, we consider a regression technique, known as Deming regression, which takes into account the error in measurement of the independent variable, the size. Deming regression is applied to four publically available datasets in order to model the linear relationship between effort and size and to compare it with ordinary least squares. Results: Accuracy measures of fitting (MAE, MdAE, MMRE, MdMRE, pred25) are improved by the Deming regression. Comparison of Absolute Errors (AE) by the Wilcoxon test shows significant difference at Conclusions: Deming regression is appropriate for datasets where the size is subject to measurement error. However some assumptions on the variances of the measurement errors are arbitrary and need to be studied. Further work is needed for using the Deming regression for effort prediction.