A case study using web objects and COSMIC for effort estimation of web applications

Some size measures have been proposed in the literature to be employed in estimating Web application development effort, but to date few empirical studies have been undertaken to validate them and compare their effectiveness. To address this issue we have performed an empirical study by using as size measures COSMIC and Web Objects, with the aim of verifying their effectiveness as indicators of development effort. In particular, we have built two effort estimation models by applying the Ordinary Least-Squares regression and by using a dataset of 15 Web applications developed by an italian software company. The performance of the obtained models have been evaluated by using a dataset of further 4 Web applications developed by the same software company some time after the first 15Web applications. The results reveal that both Web Objects and COSMIC are good indicators of the development effort. © 2008 IEEE