A straightforward approach to effort estimation for updating programs in object-oriented prototyping development

Discusses the estimation of the effort needed to update programs according to a given requirement change. In object-oriented prototyping development (OO prototyping), the requirement changes occur frequently and regularly. Thus, a simple and fast estimation of effort is strongly required by both developers and managers. However, existing estimation methods cannot be applied to OO prototyping. Therefore, we propose a straightforward approach to effort estimation, which reflects the specific properties of OO prototyping. First, we analyze the following characteristics of OO prototyping: (1) updating activities consist of creation, deletion and modification; (2) the target to be updated has four kinds of types (void type, basic type, library type and custom type); and (3) the degree of information hiding is classified into private, protected and public. Then, we present a new formula E(P,σ) to calculate the effort needed to update a program P according to a set of requirement changes σ. The formula E(P,σ) includes the weighting parameters w_upd, w_type and w_inf-h according to the characteristics (1), (2) and (3), respectively. Finally, we conduct experimental evaluations by applying the formula E(P,σ) to actual project data in a certain company. The evaluation results prove statistically (to some extent) the validity of the proposed approach