Recommender system for software project planning one application of revised CBR algorithm

Project management is an experience-driven and knowledge-centralized activity. Therefore, project managers require some assistance to reduce the uncertainty at the early stage of constructing project plans. To overcome the predicament faced by project managers, this investigation proposes a hierarchical criteria architecture (HCA) to enable project managers to describe project requirements adequately. Furthermore, to solve HCA problems, a revised case-based reasoning (RCBR) algorithm, is presented and a recommender system for software project planning is implemented, based on multiple objectives decision techniques and the mining approach. Finally, the proposed RCBR algorithm is successfully applied to analyze 41 real projects from a software consultancy in Taiwan. Experimental results demonstrate that RCBR can efficiently provide related information to help project managers to construct project plans at an early stage. Additionally, the knowledge discovery process of RCBR provides project managers with results similar to what-if analysis. The knowledge can enable project managers to obtain feasible information to re-schedule project resources, and bargain with their customers in the early project planning stage.