On the Use of Requirements Measures to Predict Software Project and Product Measures in the Context of Android Mobile Apps: a Preliminary Study

In this paper, we study the value of software project and product measures in the context of Android mobile apps. In particular, we focus on the effort to develop mobile apps and the number of graphical components in these apps. Estimation models are based on information from requirements specification documents (e.g., Number of actors, number of use cases, and number of classes). We have used a dataset containing information on 23 Android apps and employed a stepwise linear regression to build estimation models. The predictions have been compared with those obtained considering models built on software measures (e.g., Number of classes, number of files, and number of line of code). The results suggest that the measures from the artifacts produced in requirements engineering process are not worse predictors than those measures from source code. That is, requirements measures can effectively employed to estimate software project and product measures of a mobile app and estimations can be done early in the software development process.