Integrating Emotional Requirements in Use-Case Point Model for Effort Estimation of Healthcare System

The software industry was greatly affected by the pandemic. The emotions and human behavior of software developers and users greatly affected the development of software systems. Accurate effort estimation is a key role in the success of any software project. Among many software effort estimation models, the use-case point (UCP) model is one of software development’s maximum-used effort estimation models. So many research studies have addressed the effort estimation of software projects through the UCP model, but the effort estimation of specific quality and emotional requirements for the software system receives minimal focus. To fill this gap, we have proposed an extension to the existing standard UCP model. In the extended UCP model, we have introduced two new quality and emotional components. We applied the extended UCP estimation model to estimate the effort to build all types of software system requirements and analyze the influence of quality and emotional requirements on the effort estimation value. A real-time emotion-based healthcare case study was used by the authors to create and compare effort estimation models for estimating requirement-type efforts through UCP size. We have taken two more case studies named Internet banking system, and E-commerce application for further validation of our study. We found the mean magnitude of relative error (MMRE =0.086), mean magnitude of error relative (MMER =0.092), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE =8.6%). Our proposed methodology gives an 8.6% error, showing our model’s accuracy. Expert opinions have also been taken to assess our study. Most industry experts validated our study by suggesting three additional human factors (social, cultural, and economic) that may impact the software project’s effort estimation.