Change effort estimation based on UML diagrams application in UCP and COCOMOII

摘要

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.