An Empirical Study of Software Size Estimation Techniques by Use Case

Use Case에 의한 소프트웨어 규모 예측 방법에 대한 실증적 연구

There has been a need for predicting development efforts and costs of the system during the early stage of the software process and hundreds of metrics have been proposed for computer software, but not all provide practical support to the software engineer. Some demand measurement that is too complex, others are so esoteric that few real-world professionals have any hope of understanding them, and others violate the basic intuitive notions of what high-quality software really is. It is worthwhile that metrics should be tailored to best accommodate specific products and processes after grasping their good and no good point. This paper describes two size estimation techniques, the Karner technique and the Marchesi technique, and compares and analyzes them with proposed evaluation criteria. Both techniques are to estimate software size analyzed by use case that is mainly described during the object-oriented analysis phase. We also present an empirical comparison of them, both are applied in the Internet Medicine Prescription System. We also propose some guidance for experiments based on our analysis. We believe that it should be facilitating project management more effective by adjusting software metrics properly.