Development of integrated software project planning model

As the most uncertain and complex project when compared to other types of projects, software development project is highly depend on the result of software project planning phase that helping project managers by predicting the project demands with respect to the budgeting, scheduling, and the allocation of resources. The two main activities in software project planning are effort estimation and risk assessment which has to be executed together because the accuracy of the effort estimation is highly dependent on the size, nature, and number of project risks, which are inherent in a particular software project. However, as is common practice in a software development project, these two activities are often disconnected from each other and effort estimation methodologies provide a fixed rather than an approximate value, and consequently the existing effort estimation approach has failed to provide a reliable reference for project manager due to its lack of accuracy. This paper introduces the Integrated Software Development Project Planning Model based on COCOMO cost factors and the fuzzy technique, which has the capability to not only integrate the effort estimation and risk assessment activities but also to provide the information about the estimated effort, the project risks, and the effort contingency value to accommodate the identified risk. A validation of this model using public project data set shows that the new approach is capable of improving the existing effort estimation performance using COCOMO.