Authors:
Dhikra Kchaou
1
;
Nadia Bouassida
1
and
Hanene Ben-Abdallah
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Sfax, Tunisia
;
2
University of Sfax and King Abdulaziz University, Tunisia
Keyword(s):
Effort Estimation, Change, COCOMO, UCP.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Requirements Elicitation and Specification
;
Scheduling and Estimating
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Engineering Methods and Techniques
;
Software Project Management
Abstract:
Change impact must be accounted for during effort estimation to provide for adequate decision making at the
appropriate moment in the software lifecycle. Existing effort estimation approaches, like the Use Case Point
method and the COnstructive COst MOdeL, estimate the effort only if the change occurs at one level, for
example when a new functionality is added (at functional level). However, they do not treat elementary
changes at the design level such as the addition of a class or a sequence diagram; because they incur several
modifications at different modelling levels, such changes are important to account for in effort estimation
during the software development. In this paper, we take advantage of intra and inter UML diagrams dependencies,
first, to assist developers in identifying the necessary changes that UML diagrams must undergo after
a potential change, and secondly to estimate the necessary effort to handle any elementary change e.g. adding
a class, an attribute,
etc. We use our traceability technique in order to adapt the UCP and COCOMO methods
to estimate the effort whenever a change occurs during the requirement or design phases.
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