Geetika Batra and Mahima Trivedi
L.N.C.T.,Indore, India

The most significant activity in software project management is Software development effort prediction.Ubiquitous availability of COCOMO model revealed many possibilities with a perspective of optimizationof cost. Cost drivers have significantinfluence on the COCOMO and this research investigates the role ofcost drivers in improving the precision of effort estimation Fuzzy logic has been applied to the COCOMOusing membership functions to represent the cost drivers. Using Trapezoidal Membership Function (TMF),a few attributes are assigned the maximum degree of compatibility when they should be assigned lowerdegrees. To overcome the above limitation, in this paper, it is proposed to use Gaussian MembershipFunction (GMF) for the cost driversby studying the behavior of COCOMO cost drivers. It has been foundthat Gaussian function is performing better than the trapezoidal function, as it demonstrates a smoothertransitionin its intervals, and the achieved results were closer to the actual effort.

COCOMO, Fuzzy based effort estimation, Gaussian membership function, Software cost estimation,Software effort estimation and Project management.