Particle Swarm Optimization is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm widely used across a broad range of applications. The algorithm has certain primary advantages such as its ease of implementation, high convergence accuracy, and fast convergence speed. Nevertheless, since its origin in 1995, Particle swarm optimization still suffers from two primary shortcomings, i.e., premature convergence and easy trapping in local optima. Therefore, this study proposes modified chaotic particle swarm optimization with uniform particle initialization to enhance the comprehensive performance of standard particle swarm optimization by introducing three additional schemes. Firstly, the initialized swarm is generated through a uniform approach. Secondly, replacing the linear inertia weight by introducing the nonlinear chaotic inertia weight map. Thirdly, by applying a personal learning strategy to enhance the global and local search to avoid trap in local optima. The proposed algorithm is examined and compared with standard particle swarm optimization, two recent particle swarm optimization variants, and a nature-inspired algorithm using three software effort estimation methods as benchmark functions: Use case points, COCOMO, and Agile. Detailed investigations prove that the proposed schemes work well to develop the proposed algorithm in an exploitative manner, which is created by a uniform particle initialization and avoids being trapped on the local optimum solution in an explorative manner and is generated by a personal learning strategy and chaotic-based inertia weight.

Accurate effort estimation of software development plays an important role to predict how much effort should be prepared during the works of a software project so that it can be completed on time and budget. Some sectors, e.g. banking sectors, were renowned fields of software projects, not only due to its huge size of project, but also extremely expensive and takes a long time to completion. Project estimation is essential for software development project able to run on time and budget with maximum quality. This study aims to investigate the accuracy of software project effort estimation with the Analogy method using three parameters: Euclidean, Manhattan and Minkowski distance. Analogy based estimation consists several stage included similarity measure, analogy adaptation, estimation calculation and model evaluation. The results showed that the best combination of Analogy methods was using Manhattan distance with an accuracy of 50% MMRE, 28% MdMRE and Pred(25) 48%. Thus, we can concluded that this model can be used to predict accurately.