  Use Case Points (UCP) is a well-known method to estimate the project size,
based on Use Case diagram, at early phases of software development. Although
the Use Case diagram is widely accepted as a de-facto model for analyzing
object oriented software requirements over the world, UCP method did not take
sufficient amount of attention because, as yet, there is no consensus on how to
produce software effort from UCP. This paper aims to study the potential of
using Fuzzy Model Tree to derive effort estimates based on UCP size measure
using a dataset collected for that purpose. The proposed approach has been
validated against Treeboost model, Multiple Linear Regression and classical
effort estimation based on the UCP model. The obtained results are promising
and show better performance than those obtained by classical UCP, Multiple
Linear Regression and slightly better than those obtained by Tree boost model.
