An Empirical Study of Software Metrics
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An introduction to 3D function points
Software Development
Property-Based Software Engineering Measurement
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Vector-Based Approach to Software Size Measurement and Effort Estimation
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Modeling Development Effort in Object-Oriented Systems Using Design Properties
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special section on the seventh international software metrics symposium
Software Engineering Economics
Software Engineering Economics
Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II with Cdrom
Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II with Cdrom
Counterpoint: The Problem with Function Points
IEEE Software
Structural information as a quality metric in software systems organization
ICSM '97 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
Estimating Software Development Effort Based on Use Cases-Experiences from Industry
«UML» '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on The Unified Modeling Language, Modeling Languages, Concepts, and Tools
Software Sizing, Estimation, and Risk Management
Software Sizing, Estimation, and Risk Management
Three empirical studies on estimating the design effort of Web applications
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Estimating software size with UML models
Proceedings of the 2008 C3S2E conference
Model-based functional size measurement
Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
Web hypermedia content management system effort estimation model
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Transactions and paths: Two use case based metrics which improve the early effort estimation
ESEM '09 Proceedings of the 2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Introducing the evaluation of complexity in functional size measurement: a UML-based approach
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
A proposal for simplified model-based cost estimation models
PROFES'12 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
Towards a simplified definition of Function Points
Information and Software Technology
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Background. Currently there are several definitions of measures that should represent the size of software functional requirements. These measures have gained a quite relevant role, since they are one of the few basis upon which effort estimation can be based. However, traditional Functional Size Measures do not take into account the amount and complexity of the elaboration required, concentrating instead on the amount of data accessed or moved. This is a problem, when it comes to effort estimation, since the amount and complexity of the required data elaborations affect the implementation effort, but are not adequately represented by the current measures (including the standardized ones). Objective. The paper evaluates different types of functional size measures as effort estimators. Moreover, the consequences of taking into consideration also the amount and complexity of required elaboration in the effort estimation models are evaluated. Methods. In this paper we take into consideration a representative set of functional size measures (namely, function points, COSMIC function points and use case points) and a recently proposed elaboration complexity measure (Paths) and evaluate how well these measures are correlated with the development effort. To this end, we measured a set of 17 projects and analyzed the resulting data. Results. We found that it is possible to build statistically valid models of the development effort that use the functional size and complexity measures as independent variables. In fact, we discovered that using the measure of elaboration complexity in addition to the functional size substantially improves the precision of the fitting. Conclusions. The analysis reported here suggests that a measure of the amount and complexity of elaboration required from a software system should be used, in conjunction with traditional functional size measures, in the estimation of software development effort. Further investigations, involving a greater number of projects, are however needed to confirm these findings.