Deriving Complexity Metric based on Use Case Diagram and its validation

Use Case based requirements analysis has attained vast acceptance in requirements engineering. Use Case Diagram represents the functional requirements of the system to be developed from user´s perspective and also forms the starting point for documenting requirements using Unified Modeling Language (UML). Therefore the quality of Use Case Diagram has substantial impact on the quality of the resulting system. This paper presents a novel approach for deriving a Use Case Complexity Metric based on dependency and association relationships in the Use Case Diagram. The proposed Use Case Complexity Metric can be used to measure the complexity of the software to be developed and will be particularly useful for early software development estimations.