Towards a metrics suite for object oriented design
OOPSLA '91 Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
Object-oriented metrics that predict maintainability
Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue on object-oriented software
Object-oriented software metrics: a practical guide
Object-oriented software metrics: a practical guide
A software complexity model of object-oriented systems
Decision Support Systems - Special issue on information technologies and systems
Cohesion and reuse in an object-oriented system
SSR '95 Proceedings of the 1995 Symposium on Software reusability
Property-Based Software Engineering Measurement
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An investigation into coupling measures for C++
ICSE '97 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Software engineering
Managerial Use of Metrics for Object-Oriented Software: An Exploratory Analysis
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Effort estimation and prediction of object-oriented systems
Journal of Systems and Software
A Unified Framework for Coupling Measurement in Object-Oriented Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An assessment and comparison of common software cost estimation modeling techniques
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering
Exploring the relationship between design measures and software quality in object-oriented systems
Journal of Systems and Software
A Unified Framework for Cohesion Measurement in Object-OrientedSystems
Empirical Software Engineering
Replicated Case Studies for Investigating Quality Factorsin Object-Oriented Designs
Empirical Software Engineering
IEEE Software
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A proposal for using continuous attributes in classification trees
SEKE '02 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering and knowledge engineering
The Importance of Life Cycle Modeling to Defect Detection and Prevention
STEP '02 Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Software Technology and Engineering Practice
An Empirical Validation of Object-Oriented Metrics in Two Different Iterative Software Processes
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Improving Cohesion Metrics for Classes by Considering Dependent Instance Variables
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Empirical Software Engineering
Statistical significance testing: a panacea for software technology experiments?
Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue: Applications of statistics in software engineering
Class Point: An Approach for the Size Estimation of Object-Oriented Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
Modeling Design/Coding Factors That Drive Maintainability of Software Systems
Software Quality Control
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
Empirical Analysis of Object-Oriented Design Metrics for Predicting High and Low Severity Faults
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Building measure-based prediction models for UML class diagram maintainability
Empirical Software Engineering
Visual identification of software evolution patterns
Ninth international workshop on Principles of software evolution: in conjunction with the 6th ESEC/FSE joint meeting
An empirical study of the impact of team size on software development effort
Information Technology and Management
Towards a suite of quality metrics for KADS-domain knowledge
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Measuring Complexity of Object Oriented Programs
ICCSA '08 Proceedings of the international conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, Part II
A Case Study on the Impact of Refactoring on Quality and Productivity in an Agile Team
Balancing Agility and Formalism in Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
Revising cohesion measures by considering the impact of write interactions between class members
Information and Software Technology
Using Tabu Search to Estimate Software Development Effort
IWSM '09 /Mensura '09 Proceedings of the International Conferences on Software Process and Product Measurement
An application of Bayesian network for predicting object-oriented software maintainability
Information and Software Technology
A new complexity metric based on cognitive informatics
RSKT'08 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Rough sets and knowledge technology
The role of the measure of functional complexity in effort estimation
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering
Component Point: A system-level size measure for Component-Based Software Systems
Journal of Systems and Software
A tester-assisted methodology for test redundancy detection
Advances in Software Engineering - Special issue on software test automation
Using web objects for development effort estimation of web applications: a replicated study
PROFES'11 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Product-focused software process improvement
Systematic literature review of machine learning based software development effort estimation models
Information and Software Technology
The impact of software development strategies on project and structural software attributes in SOA
OTM'05 Proceedings of the 2005 OTM Confederated international conference on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems
The ability of object-oriented metrics to predict change-proneness: a meta-analysis
Empirical Software Engineering
Single and Multi Objective Genetic Programming for software development effort estimation
Proceedings of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
An approach to measure understandability of extended UML based on metamodel
ICCSA'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computational Science and Its Applications - Volume Part IV
A suite of cognitive complexity metrics
ICCSA'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computational Science and Its Applications - Volume Part IV
An in-depth study of the potentially confounding effect of class size in fault prediction
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
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In the context of software cost estimation, system size is widely taken as a main driver of system development effort. But, other structural design properties, such as coupling, cohesion, and complexity, have been suggested as additional cost factors. In this paper, using effort data from an object-oriented development project, we empirically investigate the relationship between class size and the development effort for a class and what additional impact structural properties such as class coupling have on effort. This paper proposes a practical, repeatable, and accurate analysis procedure to investigate relationships between structural properties and development effort. This is particularly important as it is necessary, as for any empirical study, to be able to replicate the analysis reported here. More specifically, we use Poisson regression and regression trees to build cost prediction models from size and design measures and use these models to predict system development effort. We also investigate a recently suggested technique to combine regression trees with regression analysis which aims at building more accurate models. Results indicate that fairly accurate predictions of class effort can be made based on simple measures of the class interface size alone (mean MREs below 30 percent). Effort predictions at the system level are even more accurate as, using Bootstrapping, the estimated 95 percent confidence interval for MREs is 3 to 23 percent. But, more sophisticated coupling and cohesion measures do not help to improve these predictions to a degree that would be practically significant. However, the use of hybrid models combining Poisson regression and CART regression trees clearly improves the accuracy of the models as compared to using Poisson regression alone.