An evaluation of the design of use case points (UCP)

The increasing popularity of use-case driven development methodologies has generated an industrial interest in software size and effort estimation based on Use Case Points (UCP). This paper presents an evaluation of the design of the UCP measurement method. The analysis looks into the concepts, as well as the explicit and implicit principles of the method, the correspondence between its measurements and empirical reality and the consistency of its system of points and weights.