A Versatile Approach for the Estimation of Software Development Effort Based on SRS Document

Abstract

Requirement engineering is a disciplined application of proven principles, methods, tools and notations to describe the behavior of a system. Generally a project suffers because of improper determination and documentation of software requirements. The intricacies in software development processes are often not understood by the client. Hence, requirements submitted by client need a careful examination. In order to produce proper artifact, it is necessary that the software requirements should be documented into the software requirement specification (SRS) on the basis of the recommendations of IEEE 830:1998 document. To address these issues, a measure for early estimation of software complexity based on SRS of the yet to be developed software is proposed. Further, this complexity measure serves as a basis for computing and deriving early estimation of software development effort too. The results obtained from the proposed measure are able to establish that the measure is accurate and precise as compared to various other existing measures that are based on the algorithm/parameters, software code, function point analysis and use case points. All this is accomplished using SRS document at an early phase of software development process. The proposed measure is robust, comprehensive, early alarming and compares well with other development effort estimation measures proposed in the past.