Software effort estimation is a significant part of software development and project management. The accuracy of effort estimation and scheduling results determines whether a project succeeds or fails. Many studies have focused on improving the accuracy of predicted results, yet accurate estimation of effort has proven to be a challenging task for researchers and practitioners, particularly when it comes to projects that use agile approaches. This work investigates the application of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) along with the novel Energy-Efficient BAT (EEBAT) technique for effort prediction in the Scrum environment. The proposed ANFIS-EEBAT approach is evaluated using real 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 ANFIS-EEBAT worked best as compared to various state-of-the-art meta-heuristic and machine learning (ML) algorithms such as fireworks, ant lion optimizer (ALO), bat, particle swarm optimization (PSO), and genetic algorithm (GA).
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