Web Effort Estimation Using FP and WO: A Critical Study

Web based services are becoming more ubiquitous. The ease-in access and the availability of web applications have increased the volume of the users who routinely access web for diverse functionality. Most of the organisations have endorsed web applications over traditional applications as a medium to deliver and offer their diverse services. With the increasing demand, the complexity of web application development has increased proportionally. The most important and critical component in web project management is to develop web projects on time and within budget. Accurate budget estimates have positive and productive impact on project management. Accuracy in estimated web efforts have direct and deeper influence on development industry. It is mandatory for any development industry to ensure accuracy and effectiveness in their web effort estimation process. This helps project management to acquire and retain good customer base and reputation among the other competing companies. This paper is an attempt to study the impact and effectiveness of function points(FP) and web objects(WO) on web size and consequently on web efforts estimation. A dataset of ten industrial web projects were used and it was observed that size estimated by using WO was more than FP in most of the projects however, the effort in most of the projects calculated by using WO were significantly better in comparison to FP.