Estimating Software Development Effort using Tabu Search

Some studies have been recently carried out to investigate the use of search-based techniques in estimating software development effort and the results reported seem to be promising. Tabu Search is a meta-heuristic approach successfully used to address several optimization problems. In this paper, we report on an empirical analysis carried out exploiting Tabu Search on two publicly available datasets, i.e., Desharnais and NASA. On these datasets, the exploited Tabu Search settings provided estimates comparable with those achieved with some widely used estimation techniques, thus suggesting for further investigations on this topic.