An empirical approach for early estimation of software testing effort using SRS document

摘要

Software testing is one of the most important and critical activity of software development life cycle, which ensures software quality and directly influences the development cost and success of the software. This paper empirically proposes a test metric for the estimation of the software testing effort, using IEEE-Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document, which aims to avoid budget overshoot, schedule escalation etc., at very early stage of software development. The effort required to test the software depends on the complexity of the proposed software. Hence, the paper first proposes to estimate the requirement based complexity of the proposed software on the basis of SRS document and further the estimation of software testing effort is carried out on the basis of requirement based complexity. The proposal is also compared with various leading and prevalent techniques for software complexity estimation and test effort estimation as proposed in the past. The result obtained validates the claim that the proposed measures are comprehensive one and compares well with various established measures. It shall act as early warning system for staffing and delivery schedules.