Object-Based Measurement in the Requirements Specification Phase

Effective software measurement enhances the software development environment. One aspect of software measurement that merits additional exploration is the pre-design phase. Research during the past two decades has shown the importance of the requirements engineering phase of the software development process. As a complement to the increased emphasis on the requirements engineering environment, we to investigate properties of the requirements phase that can provide information on the difficulty of the problem to be solved by the proposed software system. In this paper, we develop measurements that provide a characterization of the difficulty of the proposed system at the early stage of requirements definition. The characterization measurements are from an object-oriented perspective. They are based on solution objects, actions, and the level of interaction among the objects. We describe an automated tool that generates the information needed to evaluate the measurements. These characterizations provide objective measures that can be used as input to the early evaluation of problem difficulty that is required when cost and time estimates must be formulated.