Yapay sinir ağları ile yazılım projelerinin eforunun tahminlenmesi

The software industry is growing rapidly and gaining importance all over the world. Nearly all companies and institutions from various industries have software projects to develop new applications and platforms. As required with every project, accurate effort estimation has become a crucial problem for the companies, especially for project managers. Since 1970s different methods and models have been developed for estimating software projects' efforts. The first milestone model was COCOMO, which is a constructive method proposed in the late 1970s. Many different models followed, the most popular and usable models being Function Point and Use Case Point. After 2000s, due to advances in technology, Artificial Neural Networks has gained in importance especially among the problem domains that benefit from data analysis and self-learning. Software development effort estimation also share similar characteristics as there is typically old projects' data on hand that should help foresee new projects' efforts. Therefore, in this study we build a software estimation model by using neural network methodology. The features for the network were chosen as a result of an extensive survey. The applicability of the methodology is demonstrated via real-life software project data provided by one of the largest banks in Turkey. Keywords : Software development effort estimation, Neural networks, Back propagation algorithm