Estimating effort by use case points: Method, tool and case study

Use case point (UCP) method has been proposed to esti-mate software development effort in early phase of software project and used in a lot of software organizations. Intu-itively, UCP is measured by counting the number of actors and transactions included in use case models. Several tools to support calculating UCP have been developed. How-ever, they only extract actors and use cases and the com-plexity classification of them are conducted manually. We have been introducing UCP method to software projects in Hitachi Systems & Services, Ltd. To effective introduction of UCP method, we have developed an automatic use case measurement tool, called U-EST. This paper describes the idea to automatically classify the complexity of actors and use cases from use case model. We have also applied the U-EST to actual use case models and examined the differ-ence between the value by the tool and one by the special-ist. As the results, UCPs measured by the U-EST are similar to ones by the specialist. 1