Analyzing the relationship between project productivity and environment factors in the use case points method

Project productivity is a key factor for producing effort estimates from Use Case Points (UCP), especially when the historical dataset is absent. The first versions of UCP effort estimation models used a fixed number or very limited numbers of productivity ratios for all new projects. These approaches have not been well examined over a large number of projects so the validity of these studies was a matter for criticism. The newly available large software datasets allow us to perform further research on the usefulness of productivity for effort estimation of software development. Specifically, we studied the relationship between project productivity and UCP environmental factors, as they have a significant impact on the amount of productivity needed for a software project. Therefore, we designed four studies, using various classification and regression methods, to examine the usefulness of that relationship and its impact on UCP effort estimation. The results we obtained are encouraging and show potential improvement in effort estimation. Furthermore, the efficiency of that relationship is better over a dataset that comes from industry because of the quality of data collection. Our comment on the findings is that it is better to exclude environmental factors from calculating UCP and make them available only for computing productivity. The study also encourages project managers to understand how to better assess the environmental factors as they do have a significant impact on productivity.