Chandigarh University

Test Effort Estimation is an important activity in software development. The test effort can be calculated on the basis of effort cost and time required for testing. Several studies have been done for developing test effort estimation models but to some extent only, most of these models result in erroneous results. So there is a strong need to optimize the efforts estimated. Meta heuristic techniques can be used for this purpose, to optimize a problem by iteratively trying to improve a solution, using some computational methods. In this paper, we have implemented meta-heuristic based search algorithm namely PSO. The particle swarm optimization algorithm is used for improving testing effort estimation. The particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is applied on use case point (UCP) and results led us to the conclusion that test effort estimation can be optimized by applying PSO. The PSO optimization can also be applied for estimating efforts of software development. This implementation increases the accuracy of testing effort estimation. Keywords Software testing, particle swarm optimization (PSO) and use case point (UCP). 1