OBJECT POINTS (POP) ESTIMATION PROCESS IN OO ENVIRONMENT

Many effort estimation techniques exist for sizing software systems but none is directly used to measure object-oriented software. Most of the researchers have worked for size and effort evaluation but still the problem has not been fully resolved. Many of the existing estimation techniques work specifically for specific development environment. PRICE systems has developed the predictive object point (POP) metric for predicting effort required for developing an object oriented software system and is based on the counting scheme of function point (FP) method. Though it was an interesting theoretical development, but due to lack of an easy to use support tool and too much complicated formulations, it could not gain sufficient recognition from practitioners to be use on a regular basis. In this paper, we have developed simple formulations for POP calculation. The POP count formula suggested by PRICE system for estimating the effort has been simplified by introduction of new OO metric named AWC( Average Weighted Method Count). AWC metric helps in simplifying the POP count formula and preliminary results of its application in an industrial environment are presented and discussed here for validation of the suggested simplification in measurement of POP metric