Abstract—Accurate effort estimation is the state of art of the Software Engineering activities and of course it is a complex process. On the other hand, it is also widely accepted that due to the inherent uncertainty in software development requirements and activities, it is unrealistic to expect very accurate effort estimates over the software development processes. Among the diversified effort estimation models, empirical estimation models are found to be possibly accurate compared to other estimation schemes. The work reported in this paper aims at improving the accuracy of one of the popular effort estimation models, COCOMO II. Since the accuracy of the COCOMO II stands over the cost derives and scale factor, this work investigates the influence of the cost drives and scale factor to improve the accuracy of the effort estimation. It is proved that, with a set of possible modifications in scale factor and cost drives, the overall accuracy of the COCOMO II can be improved. The improvement has been proved in terms of the performance validation factors such as Magnitude of Relative Error (MRE), Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE), Root Mean Square (RMS) and Relative Root Mean Square (RMS & RRMS).

Index Terms—Effort Estimation, COCOMO II, graphical estimation, SLIM, SEER.

Ziyad T. Abdulmehdi, M. S. Saleem Basha, Mohamed Jameel, and P. Dhavachelvan are with the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Mazoon University College, Muscat, Oman (e-mail: Ziyad@mazooncollege.edu.om, saleem@mazooncollege.edu.om, mohammed.jameel@mazooncollege.edu.om).

Cite:Ziyad T. Abdulmehdi, M. S. Saleem Basha, Mohamed Jameel, and P. Dhavachelvan, "A Variant of COCOMO II for Improved Software Effort Estimation," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 346-350, 2014.