Functional Software Size Measurement Methodology With Effort Estimation And Performance Indication

Author : Munshi Asadullah
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (933 download)

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Download or read book Identification of Function Points in Software Specifications Using Natural Language Processing written by Munshi Asadullah and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inevitable emergence of the necessity to estimate the size of a software thus estimating the probable cost and effort is a direct outcome of increasing need of complex and large software in almost every conceivable situation. Furthermore, due to the competitive nature of the software development industry, the increasing reliance on accurate size estimation at early stages of software development becoming a commonplace practice. Traditionally, estimation of software was performed a posteriori from the resultant source code and several metrics were in practice for the task. However, along with the understanding of the importance of code size estimation in the software engineering community, the realization of early stage software size estimation, became a mainstream concern. Once the code has been written, size and cost estimation primarily provides contrastive study and possibly productivity monitoring. On the other hand, if size estimation can be performed at an early development stage (the earlier the better), the benefits are virtually endless. The most important goals of the financial and management aspect of software development namely development cost and effort estimation can be performed even before the first line of code is being conceived. Furthermore, if size estimation can be performed periodically as the design and development progresses, it can provide valuable information to project managers in terms of progress, resource allocation and expectation management. This research focuses on functional size estimation metrics commonly known as Function Point Analysis (FPA) that estimates the size of a software in terms of the functionalities it is expected to deliver from a user's point of view. One significant problem with FPA is the requirement of human counters, who need to follow a set of standard counting rules, making the process labour and cost intensive (the process is called Function Point Counting and the professional, either analysts or counters). Moreover, these rules, in many occasion, are open to interpretation, thus they often produce inconsistent counts. Furthermore, the process is entirely manual and requires Function Point (FP) counters to read large specification documents, making it a rather slow process. Some level of automation in the process can make a significant difference in the current counting practice. Automation of the process of identifying the FPs in a document accurately, will at least reduce the reading requirement of the counters, making the process faster and thus shall significantly reduce the cost. Moreover, consistent identification of FPs will allow the production of consistent raw function point counts. To the best of our knowledge, the works presented in this thesis is an unique attempt to analyse specification documents from early stages of the software development, using a generic approach adapted from well established Natural Language Processing (NLP) practices.