A Comparative Study of Software Development Size Estimation Method: UCPabc vs Function Points

Abstract One of the stages in planning software development projects is to estimate the effort and cost. The good news is, there are already studies related to the estimated cost of software development projects whose results are close to the real cost. In this study, we compared two cost estimation methods which have quite small deviations, such Use Case Points - Activity Based Costing models (then namely UCPabc) and Function Points (FP). Some aspects that were compared are process and parameters, complexity factors, and deviation. The results of this research are, first, the difference of process algorithm and parameters. Secondly, there were differences in complexity factors, 21 factors on UCPabc model and 14 factors on FP method. So, the deviation between two methods of effort estimation toward actual effort was 11.9 percent using UCPabc and 27.8 percent using FP. Therefore, the UCPabc method is the closest method of effort estimation toward actual effort.