A metric suite for early estimation of software testing effort using requirement engineering document and its validation

Software testing is one of the most important and critical activity of software development life cycle which ensures software quality and directly influences the development cost and success of the software. This paper empirically proposes a test metric for the estimation of the software testing effort using IEEE-Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document in order to avoid budget overshoot, schedule escalation etc., at very early stage of software development. Further the effort required to develop or test the software will also depend on the complexity of the proposed software. Therefore the proposed test metric computes the requirement based complexity for yet to be developed software on the basis of SRS document. Later the proposed measure is also compared with other proposals for test effort estimation like code based, cognitive value based and use case based measures. The result obtained validates that the proposed test metric is a comprehensive one and compares well with various other prominent measures. The computation of proposed test effort estimation involves least overhead as compared to others.