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Employing use cases to early estimate effort with simpler metrics

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Abstract

In order to calculate size and to estimate effort in applications, the standard method most usually used is function points, which has been used with good results in the development of industrial software for some time. However, some aspects should be improved, namely: the time at which the estimation of effort is performed and the margin of error in the effort estimation. Consequently, another size metric which could be used to obtain more accurate estimations should be found. This article presents two other size metrics for projects based on use cases: transactions and entity objects. Effort is estimated by using the technique mean productivity value. There is also a description of two case studies, one which involved four academic projects and the other one which involved four industrial projects. They were developed in order to compare the estimations obtained with each method. The result shows that the current way of estimating effort can be improved by using the number of transactions as a size metric and the technique mean productivity value.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Gabriela Robiolo

  2. Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ricardo Orosco

Authors
  1. Gabriela Robiolo
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  2. Ricardo Orosco
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Correspondence to Gabriela Robiolo.

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Robiolo, G., Orosco, R. Employing use cases to early estimate effort with simpler metrics. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 4, 31–43 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-007-0043-y

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