Abstract
Empirical studies are important in software engineering to evaluate new tools, techniques, methods and technologies. In object-oriented analysis, use case models describe the functional requirements of a software system, so they can be the basis for software measurement and sizing. The purpose of this study is to develop a new metric called Architectural Element Points (AEPoint) that enables to calculate the effort required to develop a software solution, using the 4-Step Rule Set (4SRS) method. This paper describes a case study with 60 undergraduate students grouped in four teams that developed a software system (Web application) for a real customer. In this study, we used the AEPoint metric to estimate the resources needed to develop a software system. The results of the AEPoint and Use Case Points (UCP) metrics and the real software development effort are compared, conclusions drawn and recommendations are proposed.
This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.
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The authors would like to thank the referees for their valuable comments.
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Alves, L.M., Ribeiro, P., Machado, R.J. (2016). Architectural Element Points: Estimating Software Development Effort by Analysis of Logical Architectures. In: Wrycza, S. (eds) Information Systems: Development, Research, Applications, Education. SIGSAND/PLAIS 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 264. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46642-2_5
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