Investigating metrics for a development effort prediction model of Web applications

Although there are metrics proposed in the hypermedia literature to measure hypermedia processes and products, many lack the necessary theoretical and empirical validation. To address these issues, this paper presents the results of a quantitative case study which validated empirically a set of metrics proposed to measure the development effort involved in authoring World Wide Web applications. These metrics adhere to the representational theory of measurement. The results obtained for the case study have shown that three out of four of the proposed metrics presented statistically significant correlations with development effort, suggesting that they may be useful parameters for a prediction model that estimates the effort involved in developing Web applications.