Applying requirement based complexity for the estimation of software development and testing effort

Abstract

The need of computing the software complexity in requirement analysis phase of software development life cycle (SDLC) would be an enormous benefit for estimating the required development and testing effort for yet to be developed software. Various research proposals are directed towards minimizing the cost of software. Also, a relationship between source code and difficulty in developing a source code are also attempted in order to estimate the complexity of the proposed software for cost estimation, man power build up, code and developer's evaluation. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic and integrated approach for the estimation of software development and testing effort on the basis of improved requirement based complexity (IRBC) of the proposed software. The IRBC measure serves as the basis for estimation of these software development activities to enable the developers and practitioners to predict the critical information about the software development intricacies. Efficient software development requires accurate estimates, since inappropriate estimates causes' trouble during implementation of software process. Hence, this paper presents a comprehensive approach, for the prediction of software development and testing effort using IRBC. For validation purpose, the proposed measures are categorically compared with various established and prevalent practices proposed in the past like code based, use case based, algorithmic model and function point based estimation measures. Finally, the results obtained, validates the claim, for the approaches discussed in this paper, for estimation of software development and testing effort, in the early phases of software development appears to be robust, comprehensive, early alarming and compares well with other measures proposed in the past. Hence, it is even more useful because the complexity, development and testing effort estimates are obtained at very early stage.