Impact of Product Complexity on Actual Effort in Software Developments: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Background:] Software effort prediction methods and models typically assume positive correlation between software product complexity and development effort. However, conflicting observations, i.e. negative correlation between product complexity and actual effort, have been witnessed from our experience with the COCOMO81 dataset. [Aim:] Given our doubt about whether the observed phenomenon is a coincidence, this study tries to investigate if an increase in product complexity can result in the abovementioned counterintuitive trend in software development projects. [Method:] A modified association rule mining approach is applied to the transformed COCOMO81 dataset. To reduce noise of analysis, this approach uses a constant antecedent (Complexity increases while Effort decreases) to mine potential consequents with pruning. [Results:] The experiment has respectively mined four, five, and seven association rules from the general, embedded, and organic projects data. The consequents of the mined rules suggested two main aspects, namely human capability and product scale, to be particularly concerned in this study. [Conclusions:] The negative correlation between complexity and effort is not a coincidence under particular conditions. In a software project, interactions between product complexity and other factors, such as Programmer Capability and Analyst Capability, can inevitably play a "friction" role in weakening the practical influences of product complexity on actual development effort.

On a Factorial Knowledge Architecture for Data Science-powered Software Engineering

“…After examining the factor pairs, it is natural to focus on threefactor software engineering knowledge. For example, a data mining study shows that, to certain extents, a more complex project would inevitably employ highly capable programmers and use advanced tools, which will play a "friction" role in weakening the effect of product complexity on actual effort for software development, as described in Li-O'Brien-Yang's Law [21] (see K3 in Figure 2): "Increasing product complexity will result in interactions with other factors that could weaken and even overwhelmingly weaken the complexity's influence on actual effort in software projects. "…”

“…Although closely related to requirements as well, the fixed product properties are regarded as a software project's inherent factors. For example, the application type will never be changed once it is defined, the involved data and functional features and counts are essentially part of the software product, while the corresponding product complexity has been identified to be neither reducible nor simplify-able [21].…”