Establishing relationships between specification size and software process effort in CASE environments

Advances in software process technology have rendered many existing methods of size assessment and effort estimation inapplicable. The use of automation in the software process, however, provides an opportunity for the development of more appropriate software size-based effort estimation models. A specification-based size assessment method has therefore been developed and tested in relation to process effort on a preliminary set of systems. The results of the analysis confirm the assertion that, within the automated environment class, specification size indicators (that may be automatically and objectively derived) are strongly related to process effort requirements.Unpublished1 Mukhopadhyay, T and Kekre, S 'Software Effort Models for Early Estimation of Process Control Applications' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 18 (October 1992) pp 915-924 2 Tate, G, Verner, J and Jeffery, R 'CASE: A Testbed for Modeling, Measurement and Management' Communications of the ACM Vol 35 No 4 (April 1992) pp 65-72 3 MacDonell, S 'Deriving relevant functional measures for automated development projects' Information and Software Technology Vol 35 No 9 (Sept 1993) pp 499-512 4 Curtis, B 'The Measurement of Software Quality and Complexity,' in A J Perlis, F G Sayward, and M Shaw (eds) Software Metrics MIT Press, Massachusetts (1981) pp 203-224 5 Weissman, L 'Psychological Complexity Of Computer Programs: An Experimental Methodology' ACM SIGPLan Notices Vol 9 (June 1974) pp 25-36 6 Brooks, F P Jr 'No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering' IEEE Computer Vol 20 (April 1987) pp 10-19 7 Henry, S and Lewis, J 'Integrating Metrics into a Large-Scale Software Development Environment' Journal of Systems and Software Vol 13 (1990) pp 89-95 8 Munson, J C and Khoshgoftaar, T M 'Applications of a Relative Complexity Metric for Software Project Management' Journal of Systems and Software Vol 12 (1990) pp 283-291 9 Boehm, B W and Papaccio, P N 'Understanding and Controlling Software Costs' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 14 (October 1988) pp 1462-1477 10 Paulson, D and Wand, Y 'An Automated Approach to Information Systems Decomposition' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 18 (March 1992) pp 174-189 11 Case, A F Jr., Information Systems Development: Principles of Computer-Aided Software Engineering Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ (1986) 12 Samson, W B, Nevill, D G and Dugard, P I 'Predictive Software Metrics Based on a Formal Specification' Information and Software Technology Vol 29 (June 1987) pp 242-248 13 Symons, C R Software Sizing and Estimating: Mk II FPA (Function Point Analysis) John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1991) 14 Verner, J, Tate, G, Jackson, B and Hayward, R G 'Technology Dependence in Function Point Analysis: A Case Study and Critical Review' Proceedings 11th International Conference on Software Engineering, Pittsburgh PA(1989) pp 375-382 15 Albrecht, A J 'Measuring Application Development Productivity' Proceedings IBM GUIDE/SHARE Applications Development Symposium California (1979) 16 DeMarco, T Controlling Software Projects Yourdon, New York (1982) 17 Tate, G and Verner, J 'Approaches to Measuring Size of Application Products with CASE Tools' Information and Software Technology Vol 33 (November 1991) pp 622-628 18 MacDonell, S G 'Comparative Review of Functional Complexity Assessment Methods for Effort Estimation' Software Engineering Journal (May 1994) pp 107-116 19 Basili, V R and Rombach, H D 'The TAME Project: Towards Improvement-Oriented Software Environments' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 14 (June 1988) pp 758-773 20 Bush, M E and Fenton, N E 'Software Measurement: A Conceptual Framework' Journal of Systems and Software Vol 12 (1990) pp 223-231 21 Gray, R H M, Carey, B N, McGlynn, N A and Pengelly, A D 'Design Metrics for Database Systems' BT Technology Journal Vol 9 (October 1991) pp 69-79 22 Boehm, B W, Gray, T E and Seewaldt, T 'Prototyping Versus Specifying: A Multiproject Experiment' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 10 (May 1984) pp 290-302 23 Lin, C-Y 'Systems Development With Application Generators: An End User Perspective' Journal of Systems Management (April 1990) pp 32-36 24 Eglington, D 'Cost-Effective Computer System Implementation in Medium Sized Companies' in Gillies, A (ed) Case Studies in Software Engineering Salford University Business Services Ltd (March 1991) pp 56-59 25 Kemerer, C F 'An Empirical Validation of Software Cost Estimation Models' Communications of the ACM Vol 30 (May 1987) pp 416-429 26 Mukhopadhyay, T, Vicinanza, S S and Prietula, M J 'Examining the Feasibility of a Case-Based Reasoning Model for Software Effort Estimation' MIS Quarterly (June 1992) pp 155-171 27 Wittig, G E and Finnie G R 'Using Artificial Neural Networks and Function Points to Estimate 4GL Software Development Effort' Australian Journal of Information Systems (May 1994) pp 87-94 28 Srinivasan, K and Fisher, D 'Machine Learning Approaches to Estimating Software Development Effort' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 21 (February 1995) pp 126-137 29 Kitchenham, B A and Pickard, L M 'Towards a Constructive Quality Model Part II: Statistical techniques for modelling software in the ESPRIT REQUEST project' Software Engineering Journal (July 1987) pp 114-126 30 Hampel, F R, Ronchetti, E M, Rousseeuw, P J and Stahel, W A Robust Statistics John Wiley & Sons, New York (1986) 31 Rousseeuw, P J and Leroy, A M Robust Regression and Outlier Detection John Wiley & Sons, New York (1987) 32 Conte, S D, Dunsmore, H E and Shen, V Y Software Engineering Metrics and Models Benjamin/Cummings, Menlo Park CA (1986) 33 Verner, J and Tate, G 'A Software Size Model' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Vol 18 (April 1992) pp 265-278 34 Tate, G and Verner, J 'Software Costing in Practice' in Veryard, R Information and Software Economics Butterworth Scientific UK (1990) 35 Tate, G 'Management, CASE and the Software Process' Proceedings 12th New Zealand Computer Conference Dunedin (1991) pp 247-25