Correlations between problem and solution domain measures of open source software

Abstract

Software size measurement and effort estimation methodologies in use today usually take the detailed requirements of software to be developed as the primary input and a certain amount of time and expertise is needed for size measurement. This paper analyzes the open source projects' correlations between the problem domain measures (the number of nouns and verbs) and solution domain measures (the number of software classes and methods). In this paper, 27 open source software projects are analyzed. Linear regression and cross validation techniques are applied to investigate the relation between the sizes of problem domain (i.e., conceptual) and solution domain (i.e., design) measures. The results reveal a strong correlation between the problem domain measures and the solution domain measures constituting the corresponding software. The results suggest that it is possible to use problem domain descriptions in the early stages of software development projects to make plausible predictions for the size and effort of the software.