A Size Estimation Model for Board-Based Desktop Games

Software size estimation plays a key role in the planning of projects at the time of project inception. This paper describes the derivation, validation, and usage of a parametric model meant for estimating the size of board-based desktop games. This model is derived using forward stepwise multiple linear regression on a data set comprising over 60 open source board-based games collected from multiple open source repositories. A variety of prediction accuracy metrics (e.g., MMRE, PRED(x), MdMRE, and so on) are used to assess this model and K-fold cross-validation is used to validate this model. Model assessment and validation exercises yield promising results. The utility of this model is demonstrated by presenting a worked-out game size estimation example followed by some size-related what-if analyses.