Estimating Web Application Development Effort Using Web-COBRA and COSMIC: An Empirical Study

Even if the adaptation of the COBRA method to the web has many appealing characteristics, its effectiveness in predicting Web application development effort has been previously assessed only in one empirical study, using the Web Objects measure. The study provided positive results,but it is widely recognized that several empirical investigations should be performed to validate/confirm the usefulness of effort estimation approaches. Moreover, the use of other size measures in combination with Web-COBRA has not yet been investigated in the literature. These two aspects encouraged us to further analyze the effectiveness of Web-COBRA. In particular, we used a dataset of 15 Web applications, whose functional size was measured using COSMIC. In this paper we describe the empirical analysis we conducted, whose results confirm that Web-COBRA can be profitably exploited for estimating Web application development effort, also when used in combination with COSMIC.