Estimating the design effort of Web applications

We focus on the effort needed for designing Web applications. The effort required for the design phase is an important part of the total development effort of a Web application, whose implementation can be (partially) automated by tools. We carried out an empirical study with the students of an advanced university class that used W2000, as the special-purpose object-oriented design notation for the design of Web applications. We investigated the impact of a number of attributes (e.g., size, complexity) of the W2000 design artifacts built during the design phase on the total effort needed to design Web applications and we identified a few attributes that may be related to the total design effort. In addition, we carried out a finer-grain analysis, by studying which of these attributes have an impact on the effort devoted to the steps of the design phase that are followed when using W2000.