Constraint-Based Recommendation for Software Project Effort Estimation

Identifying the most appropriate effort estimation methods is an important aspect for software project management. Within the scope of an software industry cluster project an expert system recommending estimation methods that best match the software development project's characteristics and context has been developed. The knowledge-based recommender exploits an explicit knowledge base in order to infer matching items based on the software project's context. The contribution of this paper lies in presenting a constraint-based reasoning mechanism for computing recommendable items from a large set of choices and in its application to the domain of software project management.