An Empirical Study on Software Test Effort Estimation for Defense Projects

Effort estimation of software testing plays a vital role in the effective completion of testing. In particular, software test effort estimation in defense projects is not an easy and simple phenomenon, owing to internal and external factors. This study aims to investigate the relationships between software test metrics used in the industry and software testing efforts. A method for estimating the testing effort is proposed using a novel set of software testing metrics that have not been used in any previously proposed software test effort estimation methods. In this study, 15 completed software projects of a CMMI Level-3 certified defense industry company were analyzed. The results of the empirical study show that the proposed method with the given metrics provides acceptable prediction quality, with Pred (0.25) and Pred (0.30) values equal to 0.867. We obtained plausible results and demonstrated that our newly proposed metrics can be safely used for software test effort estimation.