Estimation of Software Testing Effort: An Intelligent Approach
Praveen Ranjan Srivastava · 2009
Testing is an important process of software development that is performed to support and enhance reliability and quality of the software. Studies indicate that 40-50 percent of the cost of software development is devoted to testing, with the percentage for testing critical software being even higher. This poster makes an attempt to estimate reliable software testing effort using fuzzy testing is a necessary and important activity of software development process. Myers (1979) states that Software Testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors. The importance of testing can be understood by the fact that around 35% of the elapsed time and over 50% of the total cost are expending in testing programs. Development Effort (SDE) estimation is the process of predicting the most realistic use of effort required to develop or maintain software based on incomplete, uncertain and/or noisy input. Effort estimates may be used as input to project plans, iteration plans, budgets, and investment analyses, pricing processes and bidding rounds there are several models for estimating software development effort. Some of them are COnstructive COst MOdel (COCOMO), Function point analysis and so on. The COCOMO is an algorithmic software cost estimation model developed by Barry Boehm in 1981. This model uses a basic regression formula, with parameters that are derived from historical project data and current project characteristics. COCOMO model is the most widely used model for estimating the software development effort .Once we have estimated the SDE, Testing Effort (STE) is estimated as 40 to 50 percent of the development .This poster deals with the features of the STE estimation problem by proposing a novel Fuzzy model by integrating COCOMO, fuzzy logic and weighing techniques (to account for the past experience and knowledge base which influence to software testing process ), Test Effort Drivers (TEDs) into one platform. In this model triangular membership functions with monotonic constraints have been chosen, which finally achieve good generalization. The proposed model is finally validated with a case study of an Organization. Another feature of the present model is that it allows for continuous rating values and therefore avoids the problem of similar projects having large variances in cost estimations. Hence, in this poster try to estimate approximate Testing Effort (STE) value using fuzzy logic and proposed software Test Effort Drivers (TEDs).