QW2001 Paper 4T2

Mr. Suresh Nageswaran
(Cognizant Technology Solutions CTS)

Test Effort Estimation Using Use Case Points (UCP)

Key Points

Presentation Abstract

This paper presents a new approach based on Use Case Points [UCP] as a fundamental project effort-estimation measure. The use of UCP on projects is still in its infancy and it is not a very widely known measure. However, from preliminary applications on our web-based projects, we conjecture that this could in fact be more reliable than FP.

The caveat here is that the V-model must be in use and use case generation must start becoming available right at the requirements gathering phase. The acceptance test plan is then prepared with the use cases from the requirement documents as input.

It is known that a use case to test case mapping is possible. This means that the UCP figure for development can be indirectly used to provide a figure for the number of test cases. Using organizational test execution time metrics it is now possible to arrive at a figure for the total test effort.

About the Author

Suresh Nageswaran holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pune. In addition to this, he also holds the CQA certification. He has over 4 years of experience in Software Testing, Quality Assurance, Design and Development. He has also lectured on software engineering and compiler construction at Pune University.

He currently heads teams of test engineers at Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS), Pune. He has worked on varied technologies on different platforms and has conducted performance and scalability tests on conventional client/server systems as well as web-based applications.