TY - GEN
T1 - Effort estimation in incremental software development projects using function points
AU - Pow-Sang, José Antonio
AU - Imbert, Ricardo
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Nowadays, software development methodologies, such as Rational Unified Process or agile methodologies, recommend developing software by increments instead of following a waterfall lifecycle model. Although Function Points is one of the most known techniques to estimate effort and cost in software projects, there is little work that indicates how to adapt it in non-waterfall lifecycles, such as incremental ones. This paper presents an approach called Incremental-FP that allows estimating effort for each increment using unadjusted function points (UFP) and COCOMO's effort adjustment factor (EAF). This approach could be complemented with the Use Case Precedence Diagram to determine use case prioritization, and the rules proposed in a previous work to count UFP with UML class diagrams. We also present the results by applying our approach in projects with undergraduate students. We obtained good results, because the difference between estimated effort and real effort was lower than 20% for the second increment. Moreover, the results obtained with Incremental-FP were better than the ones obtained with adjusted function points.
AB - Nowadays, software development methodologies, such as Rational Unified Process or agile methodologies, recommend developing software by increments instead of following a waterfall lifecycle model. Although Function Points is one of the most known techniques to estimate effort and cost in software projects, there is little work that indicates how to adapt it in non-waterfall lifecycles, such as incremental ones. This paper presents an approach called Incremental-FP that allows estimating effort for each increment using unadjusted function points (UFP) and COCOMO's effort adjustment factor (EAF). This approach could be complemented with the Use Case Precedence Diagram to determine use case prioritization, and the rules proposed in a previous work to count UFP with UML class diagrams. We also present the results by applying our approach in projects with undergraduate students. We obtained good results, because the difference between estimated effort and real effort was lower than 20% for the second increment. Moreover, the results obtained with Incremental-FP were better than the ones obtained with adjusted function points.
KW - cocomo
KW - function points
KW - incremental software development
KW - object oriented
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84869852391&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-35267-6_61
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-35267-6_61
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84869852391
SN - 9783642352669
T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science
SP - 458
EP - 465
BT - Computer Applications for Software Engineering, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity - International Conferences, ASEA and DRBC 2012, Held in Conjunction with GST 2012, Proceedings
T2 - 2012 International Conference on Advanced Software Engineering and Its Applications, ASEA 2012, and the 2012 International Conference on Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, DRBC 2012, Held in Conjunction with GST 2012
Y2 - 28 November 2012 through 2 December 2012
ER -