Software effort estimation is the process of finding out the amount of effort that would be required to develop software. It forms the basis for planning out the various software development activities, estimating the resources-time and manpower, that will be required in developing a software. It is measured in person-months. The quality and accuracy of the estimated effort greatly affects the success of a project. One of the computational intelligence techniques that have been widely used for optimizing a non linear and multidimensional problem is particle swarm optimization technique which is inspired by the social behavior of flock of birds and school of fish. Thus particle swarm optimization can be used in optimizing various effort estimation methods. This paper represents the comprehensive survey on use of particle swarm optimization for effort estimation from the year 2008 to 2016.