Functional Size Estimation Technologies for Software Maintenance

Ebert, C. and Soubra, H.

Estimating functional software size is the key input for building software models. Unlike direct effort estimates, software size estimation gives a measure of the software product itself and can be used to build objective estimation models for predicting project effort and duration, estimating defects for quality and service cost predictions, and obtaining software development productivity ratios. Although maintenance dominates software projects, the underlying technologies for estimation have been rather poorly described to date. Here, the authors examine estimation technologies based on the COSMIC (Common Software Measurement International Consortium) method as it’s applied to maintenance projects.