A Comparative Analysis on Effort Estimation for Agile and Non-agile Software Projects Using DBN-ALO

At present, in the software industry, agile and non-agile software development approaches are followed and effort estimation is an intrinsic part of both the approaches. This work investigates the application of deep belief network (DBN) along with antlion optimization (ALO) technique for effort prediction in both agile as well as non-agile software development environment. The study also provides a prediction interval of effort to handle uncertainty in estimation. This will help the project managers to estimate the effort in ranges instead of a crisp value. The proposed DBN-ALO approach is applied on four promise repository datasets for traditional software development (non-agile), and on three agile datasets. It provides the best results in all the evaluation criteria used. The proposed approach is also statistically validated using nonparametric tests, and it is found that DBN-ALO worked best for both agile and non-agile development approaches.