Impact of product complexity on actual effort in software developments: An empirical investigation

ISCAS OpenIR

	Impact of product complexity on actual effort in software developments: An empirical investigation
	Li, Zheng (1); O'Brien, Liam (2); Yang, Ye (3)
	2014
会议名称	23rd Australasian Software Engineering Conference, ASWEC 2014
页码	170-179
会议日期	April 7, 2014 - April 10, 2014
会议地点	Sydney, NSW, Australia
收录类别	EI
出版地	IEEE Computer Society
ISBN	9781479931491
部门归属	(1) School of Computer Science, NICTA, ANU, Canberra, Australia; (2) ICT Innovation and Services, Geoscience Australia, Canberra, Australia; (3) Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
摘要	[Background:] Software effort prediction methods and models typically assume positive correlation between software product complexity and development effort. However, conflicting observations, i.e. negative correlation between product complexity and actual effort, have been witnessed from our experience with the COCOMO81 dataset. [Aim:] Given our doubt about whether the observed phenomenon is a coincidence, this study tries to investigate if an increase in product complexity can result in the abovementioned counter-intuitive trend in software development projects. [Method:] A modified association rule mining approach is applied to the transformed COCOMO81 dataset. To reduce noise of analysis, this approach uses a constant antecedent (Complexity increases while Effort decreases) to mine potential consequents with pruning. [Results:] The experiment has respectively mined four, five, and seven association rules from the general, embedded, and organic projects data. The consequents of the mined rules suggested two main aspects, namely human capability and product scale, to be particularly concerned in this study. [Conclusions:] The negative correlation between complexity and effort is not a coincidence under particular conditions. In a software project, interactions between product complexity and other factors, such as Programmer Capability and Analyst Capability, can inevitably play a 'friction' role in weakening the practical influences of product complexity on actual development effort. © 2014 IEEE.; [Background:] Software effort prediction methods and models typically assume positive correlation between software product complexity and development effort. However, conflicting observations, i.e. negative correlation between product complexity and actual effort, have been witnessed from our experience with the COCOMO81 dataset. [Aim:] Given our doubt about whether the observed phenomenon is a coincidence, this study tries to investigate if an increase in product complexity can result in the abovementioned counter-intuitive trend in software development projects. [Method:] A modified association rule mining approach is applied to the transformed COCOMO81 dataset. To reduce noise of analysis, this approach uses a constant antecedent (Complexity increases while Effort decreases) to mine potential consequents with pruning. [Results:] The experiment has respectively mined four, five, and seven association rules from the general, embedded, and organic projects data. The consequents of the mined rules suggested two main aspects, namely human capability and product scale, to be particularly concerned in this study. [Conclusions:] The negative correlation between complexity and effort is not a coincidence under particular conditions. In a software project, interactions between product complexity and other factors, such as Programmer Capability and Analyst Capability, can inevitably play a 'friction' role in weakening the practical influences of product complexity on actual development effort. © 2014 IEEE.
语种	英语
内容类型	会议论文
URI标识	http://ir.iscas.ac.cn/handle/311060/16621
专题	中国科学院软件研究所
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Li, Zheng ,O'Brien, Liam ,Yang, Ye . Impact of product complexity on actual effort in software developments: An empirical investigation[C]. IEEE Computer Society,2014:170-179.