A software size measure for estimating effort based on a software development life cycle

This paper describes a new software size measure that is based on the artifacts produced during a software development project. This measure leverages characteristics associated with most software development processes and requires the counting of attributes, where an attribute represents a distinct type of knowledge stored in a software artifact. Given the amount of data this measure requires, the empirical study measured software size of student projects, and then used this data to estimate effort using estimation by analogy. The goal of the empirical study was to assess whether this software size measure warrants further study with industry projects. Since the pred(0.25) results from this study are similar to other effort estimation studies that used academic projects, the authors' have concluded that this new software size measure warrants further study.