Ashish Sharma¹ and Dharmender Singh Kushwaha², ¹GLA University, Mathura, India and ²MNNIT - Allahabad, India

The need of computing the software complexity in requirement analysis phase of software development life cycle (SDLC) would be an enormous benefit for estimating the required development and testing effort for yet to be developed software. Also, a relationship between source code and difficulty in developing a source code are also attempted in order to estimate the complexity of the proposed software for cost estimation, man power build up, code and developer’s evaluation. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic and an integrated approach for the estimation of software development and testing effort on the basis of improved requirement based complexity (IRBC) of the proposed software. The IRBC measure serves as the basis for estimation of these software development activities to enable the developers and practitioners to predict the critical information about the software development intricacies and obtained from software requirement specification (SRS) of proposed software. Hence, this paper presents an integrated approach, for the prediction of software development and testing effort using IRBC. For validation purpose, the proposed measures are categorically compared with various established and prevalent practices proposed in the past. Finally, the results obtained, validates the claim, for the approaches discussed in this paper, for estimation of software development and testing effort, in the early phases of SDLC appears to be robust, comprehensive, early alarming and compares well with other measures proposed in the past.

IRBC, Requirement based development effort function point (RBDEFP), IEEE-830:1998 - SRS, RBDEE, Software Requirement Specification (SRS), SDLC, requirement based test effort estimation (RBTEE)