Automating Function Points analysis based on functional and non functional requirements text

Function Points (FP) are widely used as a basis to estimate software development cost and efforts. At the requirements level several estimation tools have been developed, but these tools use unified modeling language (UML) diagram. However, not all requirements documents include supplementary UML diagram. This paper describes the development of an automated tool to estimate size of software projects based on requirements text. There are two main processes in this method, namely (i) goal and scenario based requirements elicitation technique and (ii) text based function point extraction guidance rules. We evaluate the precision of the FP calculation on a set of real world documents and describe its implementation within RPURE development tool. The proposed tool has been tested on cafeteria ordering system.