An Empirical Study on the Likelihood of Adoption in Practice of a Size Measurement Procedure for Requirements Specification

Software size is one of the essential parameters of the estimation models used for project management purposes, and therefore being able to measure the size of software at an early stage of the development lifecycle is in theory of crucial importance. However, although some proposals for functional size measurement in industry do currently exist, there is as yet little validating evidence for such proposals. This paper describes an empirical study, based on the method evaluation model (MEM), of users' perceptions resulting from actual experience of use of a measurement procedure called RmFFP. This procedure was designed in accordance with the COSMIC-FFP standard method for estimating the functional size of object-oriented systems from requirements specifications obtained in the context of the OO-Method approach. In addition, an analysis of MEM relationships was also carried out using the regression analysis technique