Determining the Utility of Use Case Points and Class Points in Early Software Size Estimation
Ibrar Hussain, Ali Afzal Malik · 2023
Software size estimation is considered a pre-requisite for software effort estimation which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for project planning and budgeting. Having the capability to accurately estimate software size at the start of the project is, therefore, expected to be invaluable for software project managers. This paper presents a comparative study of the utility of two well-known software functional sizing techniques - use case points (UCP) and class points (CP) - in predicting physical software size (measured in SLOC) early in the project. A diverse dataset consisting of 30 industrial projects - 15 web apps and 15 mobile apps - is collected. First, the information contained in the relevant project artifacts is analyzed to determine the UCP and CP values of each of these projects. Then, after outlier detection and removal, simple linear regression is used to determine the early size (SLOC) prediction capability of UCP and CP for both web and mobile apps. Results of our analysis reveal that UCP is much better at the early prediction of the size of web apps while CP is much better at the early prediction of the size of mobile apps.