Cost Estimation Using Extended Use Case Point (e-UCP) Model

Estimating the cost of development is one of the most crucial and daunting tasks for a software project manager. A lot of cost estimation models were reported in the literature but many of these models became obsolete because of the rapid changes in technology. Earlier cost estimation models used the size of the ultimate software product as the primary factor which, in many cases, was difficult to estimate. For example, COCOMO model used the number of Delivered Source Instructions (DSI) which is hard to estimate for products developed using modern programming languages. On the other hand, models such as Function Point (FP) metrics were designed to consider functional requirements instead of lines of code. These models were applicable only to procedural paradigm, and are not directly applicable to software products developed using the object-oriented methodology. It is this idea that gave birth to the creation of Use Case Point (UCP) metrics, originally developed by Gustav Karner[1993]. UCP uses use cases as the primary factor; use case model is the first model developed in an object-oriented design process using UML. In this paper, the authors extended the original UCP model with additional information obtained from use case narratives.