Most product-development tasks are complex optimization problems. Design teams approach them iteratively, refining an initial best guess through rounds of engineering analysis, interpretation, and refinement. But each such iteration takes time and money, and teams may achieve only a handful of iterations within the development timeline. Because teams rarely have the opportunity to explore alternative solutions that depart significantly from their base-case assumptions, too often the final design is suboptimal. Today's technology offers an alternative.

Feature selection has been recently used in the area of software engineering for improving the accuracy and robustness of software cost models. The idea behind selecting the most informative subset of features from a pool of available cost drivers stems from the hypothesis that reducing the dimensionality of datasets will significantly minimise the complexity and time required to reach to an estimation using a particular modelling technique. This work investigates the appropriateness of attributes, obtained from empirical project databases and aims to reduce the cost drivers used while preserving performance. Finding suitable subset selections that may cater improved predictions may be considered as a pre-processing step of a particular technique employed for cost estimation (filter or wrapper) or an internal (embedded) step to minimise the fitting error. This paper compares nine relatively popular feature selection methods and uses the empirical values of selected attributes recorded in the ISBSG and Desharnais datasets to estimate software development effort.

Software cost estimation is one of the prerequisite managerial activities carried out at the software development initiation stages and also repeated throughout the whole software life-cycle so that amendments to the total cost are made. In software cost estimation typically, a selection of project attributes is employed to produce effort estimations of the expected human resources to deliver a software product. However, choosing the appropriate project cost drivers in each case requires a lot of experience and knowledge on behalf of the project manager which can only be obtained through years of software engineering practice. A number of studies indicate that popular methods applied in the literature for software cost estimation, such as linear regression, are not robust enough and do not yield accurate predictions. Recently the dual variables Ridge Regression (RR) technique has been used for effort estimation yielding promising results. In this work we show that results may be further improved if an AI method is used to automatically select appropriate project cost drivers (inputs) for the technique. We propose a hybrid approach combining RR with a Genetic Algorithm, the latter evolving the subset of attributes for approximating effort more accurately. The proposed hybrid cost model has been applied on a widely known high-dimensional dataset of software project samples and the results obtained show that accuracy may be increased if redundant attributes are eliminated.

Relational representation of knowledge makes it possible to perform all the computations and decision making in a uniform relational way by means of special relational compositions called triangle and square products. In this paper some applications in manufacturing related to cost analysis are described. Testing fuzzy relational structures for various relational properties allows us to discover dependencies, hierarchies, similarities, and equivalences of the attributes characterizing technological processes and manufactured artifacts in their relationship to costs and performance. A brief overview of mathematical aspects of BK-relational products is given in Appendix 1 together with further references in the literature.