Systematic review study of decision trees based software development effort estimation

The role of decision trees in software development effort estimation (SDEE) has received increased attention across several disciplines in recent years thanks to their power of predicting, their ease of use, and understanding. Furthermore, there are a large number of published studies that investigated the use of a decision tree (DT) techniques in SDEE. Nevertheless, in reviewing the literature, a systematic literature review (SLR) that assesses the evidence stated on DT techniques is still lacking. The main issues addressed in this paper have been divided into five parts: prediction accuracy, performance comparison, suitable conditions of prediction, the effect of the methods employed in association with DT techniques, and DT tools. To carry out this SLR, we performed an automatic search over five digital libraries for studies published between 1985 and 2019. In general, the results of this SLR revealed that most DT methods outperform many techniques and show an improvement in accuracy when combined with association rules (AR), fuzzy logic (FL), and bagging. Additionally, it has been observed a limited use of DT tools: it is therefore suggested for researchers to develop more DT tools to promote the industrial utilization of DT amongst professionals. © 2020 Science and Information Organization.