COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOFTWARE COST AND EFFORT ESTIMATION METHODS: A REVIEW

Project planning is one of the most important activities in software project. Poor planning often lead to project faults and dramatic outcomes for the project team. Software effort estimation is a very critical task in the software engineering and to control quality and efficiency a suitable estimation technique is crucial. This paper gives a comparative analysis of various available software effort estimation methods. These methods can be widely categorized under algorithmic model, non ? algorithmic model, parametric model and machine learning model. These existing methods for software cost estimation are illustrated and their aspect will be discussed. No single technique is best for all situations, and thus a careful comparison of the results of several approaches is most likely to produce realistic estimation. In this paper an example of estimation is also presented in actual software project.