Revised Use Case Point Method - Effort Estimation in Development Projects for Business Applications

Rapid and precise effort estimation of software development projects is crucial in IT industry. In a case study, the Use Case Point (UCP) method was applied to 15 commercial software development projects. The estimated efforts were compared with the incurred project efforts. We measured a standard deviation of 42 %. This is not acceptable for industrial usage. Therefore, we propose appropriate improvements of the Use Case Point method leading to significantly higher estimation accuracy with only 20 % standard deviation. The contribution of this paper is a detailed description of the improved Use Case Point method.