An enhanced support vector regression model for agile projects cost estimation

Abstract

The appearance of agile software development techniques (ASDT) since 2001 has encouraged many organizations to move to an agile approach. ASDT presents an opportunity for researchers and professionals, but it has many challenges as well. One of the most critical challenges is agile effort prediction. Hence, many studies have investigated agile software development cost estimation (ASDCE). The objective of this study is twofold: First, to propose an improved model based on support vector regression with radial bias function kernel (SVR-RBF) enhanced by the optimized artificial immune network (Optainet). Second, to perform a detailed comparative analysis of the proposed method compared to other existing optimization techniques in the literature and applied for ASDCE. The experimental evaluation was carried out by assessing the performance of the proposed method using some trusted measures like standardized accuracy (SA), mean absolute error (MAE), prediction at level p (Pred(p)), mean balanced relative error (MBRE), mean inverted balanced relative error (MIBRE), and logarithmic standard deviation (LSD). Throughout a dataset with 21 agile projects using the leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) technique. The results obtained prove that the proposed model enhances the accuracy of the SVR-RBF model, and it outperforms the majority of existing models in the literature.