Comparing Size Measures for Predicting Web Application Development Effort: A Case Study

Size represents one of the most important attribute of software products used to predict software development effort. In the past nine years, several measures have been proposed to estimate the size of Web applications, and it is important to determine which one is most effective to predict Web development effort. To this aim in this paper we report on an empirical analysis where, using data from 15 Web projects developed by a software company, we compare four sets of size measures, using two prediction techniques, namely Forward Stepwise Regression (SWR) and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). All the measures provided good predictions in terms of MMRE, MdMRE, and Pred(0.25) statistics, for both SWR and CBR. Moreover, when using SWR, length measures and Web Objects gave significant better results than Functional measures, however presented similar results to the Tukutuku measures. As for CBR, results did not show any significant differences amongst the four sets of size measures.