Automated web application functional size estimation based on a conceptual model

Project managers and developers need methods which would help them to predict the size of the software to be developed, to plan the effort and resources required for development and to estimate a number of people to be employed for the task. Determining the functional size of software is one of the methods that can meet these requirements. The paper builds on the authors' previous work on estimating effort and software size based on the conceptual models in the earlier stage of software development (the requirements phase) based on mapping between the UWE conceptual models of web applications and the COSMIC functional size. In this paper, a tool for automated functional size estimation of web applications on the basis of UWE conceptual models is presented. A case study that was carried out was based on real applications and thus evaluates this tool in a realistic environment.