Quantifying requirements elaboration to improve early software cost estimation

This paper describes an empirical study undertaken to investigate the quantitative aspects of the phenomenon of requirements elaboration which deals with transformation of high-level goals into low-level requirements. Prior knowledge of the magnitude of requirements elaboration is instrumental in developing early estimates of a project’s cost and schedule. This study examines the data on two different types of goals and requirements – capability and level of service (LOS) – of 20 real-client, graduate-student, team projects done at USC. Metrics for data collection and analyses are described along with the utility of results they produce. Besides revealing a marked difference between the elaboration of capability goals and the elaboration of LOS goals, these results provide some initial relationships between the nature of projects and their ratios of elaboration of capability goals into capability or functional requirements.