Innovative project resource allocation: estimating by analogy based on linguistic values and fuzzy inference systems
S. Mohammadi, K N Toosi, K. K. Dehkordy · 2008
Estimation models in software engineering are used to predict some important attributes of future entities such as software development cost, project resource allocation, and software reliability and programmers productivity. Among these models, those estimating software effort have motivated considerable research in recent years. The prediction procedure used by these software-effort models can be based on a mathematical function or other techniques such as analogy based reasoning, neural networks, regression trees, and rule induction models. Estimation by analogy is one of the most attractive techniques in the resource allocation estimation field. However, the procedure used in estimation by analogy is not yet able to handle correctly linguistic values (categorical data) such as 'very low', 'low' and 'high'. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on reasoning by analogy, fuzzy logic and linguistic quantifiers to estimate project resource allocation when it is described either by numerical or linguistic values; this approach is referred to as Fuzzy Analogy. This paper also presents an empirical validation of our approach based on the COCOMO'81 dataset.