Software effort estimation accuracy prediction of machine learning techniques: A systematic performance evaluation

Software effort estimation accuracy is a key factor in effective planning, controlling, and delivering a successful software project within budget and schedule. The overestimation and underestimation both are the key challenges for future software development, henceforth there is a continuous need for accuracy in software effort estimation. The researchers and practitioners are striving to identify which machine learning estimation technique gives more accurate results based on evaluation measures, datasets and other relevant attributes. The authors of related research are generally not aware of previously published results of machine learning effort estimation techniques. The main aim of this study is to assist the researchers to know which machine learning technique yields the promising effort estimation accuracy prediction in software development. In this article, the performance of the machine learning ensemble and solo techniques are investigated on publicly and non-publicly domain datasets based on the two most commonly used accuracy evaluation metrics. We used the systematic literature review methodology proposed by Kitchenham and Charters. This includes searching for the most relevant papers, applying quality assessment (QA) criteria, extracting data, and drawing results. We have evaluated a state-of-the-art accuracy performance of 35 selected studies (17 ensemble, 18 solo) using mean magnitude of relative error and PRED (25) as a set of reliable accuracy metrics for performance evaluation of accuracy among two techniques to report the research questions stated in this study. We found that machine learning techniques are the most frequently implemented in the construction of ensemble effort estimation (EEE) techniques. The results of this study revealed that the EEE techniques usually yield a promising estimation accuracy than the solo techniques.