Do Base Functional Component Types Affect the Relationship between Software Functional Size and Effort?

One of the most debated issues in Software Engineering is effort estimation and one of the main points is about which could be (and how many) the right data from an historical database to use in order to obtain reliable estimates. In many of these studies, software size (measured in either lines of code or functional size units) is the primary input. However, the relationship between effort and the components of functional size (BFC --- Base Functional Components) has not yet been fully analyzed. This study explores whether effort estimation models based on BFCs types, rather than those based on a single total value, would improve estimation models. For this empirical study, the project data in the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) Release 10 dataset, which were functionally sized by the COSMIC FFP method, are used.

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