Heterogeneous Software Effort Estimation via Cascaded Adversarial Auto-Encoder.

In Software Effort Estimation (SEE) practice, the data drought problem has been plaguing researchers and practitioners. Leveraging heterogeneous SEE data collected by other companies is a feasible solution to relieve the data drought problem. However, how to make full use of the heterogeneous effort data to conduct SEE, which is called as Heterogeneous Software Effort Estimation (HSEE), has not been well studied. In this paper, we propose a HSEE model, called Dynamic Heterogeneous Software Effort Estimation (i.e., DHSEE), which leverages the adversarial auto-encoder and convolutional neural network techniques. Meanwhile, we have investigated the scenario of conducting HSEE with dynamically increasing effort data. Experiments on ten public datasets indicate that our approach can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art HSEE method and other competing methods on both static and dynamic SEE scenarios.