Although estimating the effort required to develop Web applications can be quite a difficult task, accurate estimates of development effort play an important part in the successful management of major Web development projects. In the software engineering field, to date most work in software development has focused upon algorithmic cost models such as COCOMO and Function Points. In recent years research in the field of effort estimation has started to move towards non-algorithmic systems, where estimation by analogy is one of the available techniques. This paper describes the use of analogy to estimate the development effort of Web applications. Two datasets were used in the estimation process and the results were optimistic. As the estimation by analogy requires a considerable amount of computation, we have used an automated environment - the ANGEl tool - that supports the collection, storage and identification of the most analogous projects in order to estimate the effort for a new project. We have shown that estimating by analogy is a candidate technique and that with the aid of an automated environment it is a practical technique to apply to Web development.
展开▼
