Estimation support by lexical analysis of requirements documents

Estimation of the effort required for a software project is difficult. Various means are used, but most rely on some expert assessment of the individual requirements and their implications. A method of supporting this assessment for object-oriented developments is described. Lexical analysis of a draft requirements specification can be used to identify individual objects which will translate directly into the final implementation. These object counts can then be used to provide 'first-cut' effort estimates, using historical information from previous projects. Experiments were conducted on a problem implemented by student project teams. The results show that the untrained domain-independent automated noun and technical term finding programs used were no worse than the typical student group in deriving problem-space objects, and that these object counts provided a reasonable indicator to the effort required. Further work in this area is discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.