Approximate COSMIC Size to Early Estimate Web Application Development Effort

The aim of the paper is to investigate to what extend some COSMIC-based approximate countings can be useful for project managers to early estimate effort of Web applications. We considered the number of COSMIC Functional Processes and the Average Functional Process approach proposed by the COSMIC method documentation. We carried out an empirical analysis employing data from 25 Web applications to assess whether the two approximate sizes can be exploited to get accurate effort estimations. We compared the obtained estimations with those achieved with baseline benchmarks and employing the standard COSMIC method. The analysis highlights that the considered approximate countings provide good early estimations, significantly better than those obtained with baseline benchmarks. Moreover, the first counting provides results better than the Average Functional Process approach. The use of COSMIC-based approximate countings is a suitable approach for early effort estimations.