Using static and dynamic impact analysis for effort estimation

Abstract

Effort estimation undoubtedly happens in both software maintenance and software development phases. Researchers have been inventing many techniques to estimate change effort prior to implementing the actual change and one of the techniques is using impact analysis. A challenge of estimating a change effort during developing a software is the management of inconsistent states of software artifacts i.e., partially completed and to be developed artifacts. Our paper presents a novel model for estimating a change effort during the software development phase through integration between static and dynamic impact analysis. Three case studies of software development projects have been selected to evaluate the effectiveness of the model using the Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE) and Percentage of Prediction (PRED) metrics. The results indicated that the model has 22% MMRE relative error on average and the accuracy of our prediction was more than 75% across all case studies.