Estimating Web Application Development Effort Using Cosmic-ffp Method

In the last few years, some researchers have proposed the use of COSMIC-FFP for effort prediction of Web applications. It is widely recognized, that a measure can be accepted only if its usefulness has been proved through some empirical studies. In this paper, we reported on an empirical study carried out using an industrial dataset and compared the results obtained with a previous analysis based on Web applications developed by academic students. We used an adaptation of COSMIC-FFP specifically conceived for Web applications as size measure and the Ordinary Least Square Regression as modelling technique. This analysis had a twofold goal: to verify whether COSMIC-FFP can provide good estimations and to analyse possible differences/similarities in the empirical results obtained with the two different datasets.