Deriving relevant functional measures for automated development projects

Abstract

The increasing use of computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools, fourth-generation languages (4GLs) and other similar development automation techniques, has reduced the impact of implementation methods and individual ability on development task difficulty. It has therefore been suggested that measures derived from software specification representations may provide a consistent basis for relatively accurate estimation of subsequent development attributes. To this end, this paper describes the development of a functional complexity analysis scheme that is applicable to system specification products, rather than to the traditional products of the lower-level design and construction phases.

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

“…There is some evidence to suggest that the operations make differing contributions to overall system scope and complexity 3 . Given that this representation combines both data and functional requirements 26 it may provide a sound basis for comprehensive size indications.…”

“…It was considered that quantification of aspects of each representation would help to ensure that the assessment of system scope was as comprehensive as possible 3 . During site interviews, however, it was found that just three of the software processes examined made extensive use of data flow diagrams (DFDs), so the processing perspective (covered by DFD-type models) was disregarded for this analysis.…”

“…Using extensive statistical analyses, Mukhopadhyay and Kekre 1 , for example, were able to show that, as well as holding the inherent advantage of early derivation, their feature-based effort estimation models proved to be more effective than several other well-known techniques. Although having a similar aim to the Mukhopadhyay and Kekre work, the study reported here has been undertaken in the transaction processing/management information systems (TP/MIS) domain, and is an initial evaluation of a previously proposed assessment and estimation scheme 3 .…”

“…This approach is described in the next section. (For complete details of its derivation and justification, the interested reader is referred to the original paper 3 .) Empirical evaluation of the approach using thirteen systems from ten commercial sites is described.…”