A Review on Software Cost and Effort Estimation Techniques for Agile Development Process

In software industry, accurate estimation of cost and effort is a very crucial and important task for successful project development. A correct estimate results in timely completion of project and within the estimated budget, while if the estimated cost and effort are not accurate then it may result in project failure in terms of budget and delivery time. There are various development models which have been used in software industry based on organization’s capabilities and project requirements. Recent advancements and need of adaptation to changes in requirements resulted in the agile development methodology which gained a lot of popularity in software industries. In this framework, customer plays an active role in the development process. Hence changes in the requirements can be accommodated in any phase of development process. Various techniques are used for software cost and effort estimation including non algorithmic, algorithmic and machine learning techniques. This paper gives a review of estimation techniques used by categorising the techniques into basic estimation techniques, the techniques that are technically applicable for the estimation of projects developed using agile methodology and machine learning based techniques for estimation. KeywordsEstimation, Agile, Expert based, Machine Learning.