USING USE CASE MODELS TO GENERATE OBJECT POINTS

摘要

Project managers are required to provide size and effort estimates at several milestones throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC), which is most challenging in the early stages when no detailed information is readily available about the project. Object points (OPs) is one of the size metrics that can be used the early prototyping stages of software development. Use case (UC) elicitation and modeling technique has been extensively used, despite its deficiencies, to model and specify system requirements and system prototypes. A UC meta-model is proposed to overcome most of the UC model's deficiencies. Project managers will now be supported with a new method that utilizes the proposed UC meta-model so as to bridge the gap between UC models and the OPs counting technique. This method automatically counts the system OPs from UC models at early stages of the SDLC. Finally, the initial quantitative results of this method confirm our hypothesis which believes that the more detailed a UC model is, the more accurate the derived OPs count.