Software size prediction before coding

Abstract

There have been many empirical studies conducted for the purpose of objective measurement of software systems. As a result, various 'Software Metrics' have been introduced by various researchers. At present, efforts are being made by software researchers to get qualitatively good software developed within a reasonable cost. The quality of a software product is codetermined be several factors. Most of these factors directly or indirectly depend on the objective measurement of the software characteristics.In this paper, we have applied one of our program length estimator (N g ) on a set of about 200 programs of varying complexities coded in four different programming languages for determining the language level, program volume and programming effort. The results of this program length estimator have also been used to find out the value of constant parameter used in Conte's software size equation for the respective languages for the purpose of estimating size of programs before coding.Further, these results have been used to estimate the size of the programs written in different languages. The estimated program size has then been comparatively analysed with that of the actual program size, which has been computed using our program length estimator (N g ).