Estimating the Effort to Develop Screen Mockups

There is empirical evidence supporting the usefulness of screen mockups in improving the comprehension of use cases. Though a cost-benefit analysis would require an estimate of the effort required to produce them. In this paper, we present an empirical study with students and professionals to estimate the effort to develop mockups starting from use cases. We adopted Step Wise Linear Regression to build estimation models based on use case size measures (e.g., the number of steps and the number of characters). The leave-one-out cross validation has been adopted to assess the accuracy of our models against a baseline benchmark. The results of our empirical study show that the estimates obtained with our models are significantly better than those achieved by using the chosen baseline benchmark.