The source code size estimation metrics for object oriented systems

the most important and influential matters in the process of software engineering and main determiners of succession or failure of the projects accomplished in this domain, are cost, effort and time. The first step in the software estimation is obtaining the size of the project. Therefore, Size measurement is one of the most fundamental measurements in this . For the past two decades, the source line of code (SLOC) and function point (FP) metrics have been dominating software sizing approaches. However, both approaches have significant defects. In this paper early SLOC estimation methods in object-oriented systems were evaluated, using data collected from UML class diagrams that are available in the software development phase. The obtained Results show that the software size in terms of SLOC is moderately well correlated with the number of external use cases in use case diagrams and the number of classes in class diagrams. Information extracted from class diagrams are used to estimate SLOC, The results show that among the metrics of Class Diagram, object-oriented project size metric performs best when predicting code size.

Keywords:

Object-Oriented Systems , Source Line Of the Code (SLOC) , UML Class Diagram , Software Size Metrics