Definition and evaluation of a COSMIC measurement procedure for sizing Web applications in a model-driven development environment

Context: Model-driven development approaches facilitate the production of Web applications. Among them, the Object-Oriented Hypermedia method (OO-H) has been successfully used for the development of industrial Web applications. Similarly to other development approaches, it is important also in this context to put measures in place to support project managers in resource allocation, cost and schedule control, and productivity monitoring. Objective. This motivated us to define a measurement procedure, named OO-HCFP, specifically conceived for OO-H Web applications based on COSMIC, a second-generation functional size measurement method. Method. We present mapping and measurement rules devised to automatically derive size measures from OO-H models. We also carry out an empirical study to evaluate whether our proposed measurement procedure, OO-HCFP, is useful for estimating the effort needed to realise industrial Web applications developed with OO-H. Results. The estimates obtained by using OO-HCFP are more accurate than those obtained by using other measurement approaches based on Function Points and design measures. Conclusions. The proposed approach can be profitably exploited to size Web applications developed with OO-H. Based on our experience, we also provide some guidelines to support the formulation of COSMIC measurement procedures for other model-driven approaches.