Estimating the Design Effort of Web Applications Luciano Baresi * , Sandro Morasca + , and Paolo Paolini * * Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione Politecnico di Milano piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 - 20133 Milano (Italy) baresi@elet.polimi.it, paolini@elet.polimi.it + Dipartimento di Scienze Chimiche, Fisiche e Matematiche Università degli Studi dell'Insubria via Valleggio, 11 - 22100 Como (Italy) sandro.morasca@uninsubria.it Abstract Our study focuses on the effort needed for designing Web applications. The effort required for the design phase is an important part of the total development effort of a Web application, whose implementation can be (partially) automated by tools. We carried out an empirical study with the students of an advanced university class that used W2000, as special-purpose object-oriented design notation for the design of Web applications. We investigated the impact of a few attributes (e.g., size, complexity) of the W2000 design artifacts built during the design phase on the total effort needed to design web applications and we identified a few attributes that may be related to the total design effort. In addition, we carried out a finer-grain analysis, by studying which of these attributes have an impact on the effort devoted to the steps of the design phase that are followed when using W2000. Keywords: Web Application Design, W2000, Empirical Study, Effort Estimation Principal author: Luciano Baresi Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione Politecnico di Milano piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 - 20133 Milano (Italy) Telephone: +39 02 2399 3638 Fax: +39 02 2399 3411 E-mail: baresi@elet.polimi.it