Effort Estimation for Program Modification in Object Oriented Development

Abstract

One of the major problems faced by software developers and managers is the estimation of efforts for the development and maintenance of a programming system. In this paper, estimation of efforts needed to update programs according to a given requirement change has been discussed for the Object Oriented (OO) environment. Since the demand for these changes has to be met quickly, a method is required to estimate the efforts for making the required changes. Methods exist for estimating the efforts in OO environment but none of them cater to the needs of updating requirements. We have proposed an up-gradation to the approach for effort estimation, which makes use of certain characteristics of the OO paradigm, specifically Inheritance and Encapsulation. We found that the degree of inheritance has to be considered for effort estimation because it plays an important role for identifying which methods need to be modified and others to be reused as it is.