Using Static and Dynamic Impact Analysis for
Effort Estimation
Nazri Kama, Sufyan Basri,
Saiful Adli Ismail, and Roslina Ibrahim
Advanced Informatics School, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia,
Malaysia
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.
Keywords: Software development, change impact
analysis, change effort estimation, impact analysis, effort estimation.