Improved Software Development Effort Estimation Based on Fuzzy Logic Functions

The systems and software development industry is characterized by a paradigm of project failure. One of the known contributing causes of these project failures is poor requirements engineering and management, which has been repeatedly and widely discussed and documented. But there are other factors also like poor software project management practices, poor design strategy and inefficient testing principles also contributing to project failures.A fuzzy model is more pertinent when the systems are inadequate for analysis by conventional means or when the available data is uncertain, inaccurate or vague. In this paper, software development effort estimation using Fuzzy Triangular Membership Function, GBell Membership Function, Gauss2 Membership Function and Trapezoidal Membership Function is implemented using Mamdani Type Fuzzy inference system of Fuzzy Logic Toolbox Software of Matlab R2013a and the results of these membership functions are compared with each other and with COCOMO model. It is found that the Fuzzy Logic Model using Gaussian2 Membership Functionprovided best results.