A review and comparison of methods for determining the best analogies in analogy-based software effort estimation

Analogy-based effort estimation (ABE) is a commonly used software development effort estimation method. The processes of ABE are based on a reuse of effort values from similar past projects, where the appropriate numbers of past projects (k values) to be reused is one of the long-standing debates in ABE research studies. To date, many approaches to find this k value have been continually proposed. One important reason for this inconclusive debate is that different studies appear to produce different conclusions of the k value to be appropriate. Therefore, in this study, we revisit 8 common approaches to the k value being most appropriate in general situations. With a more robust and comprehensive evaluation methodology using 5 robust error measures subject to the Wilcoxon rank-sum statistical test, we found that conflicting results in the previous studies were not mainly due to the use of different methodologies nor different datasets, but the performance of the different approaches are actually varied widely.