G. Engels et al. (Eds.): MoDELS 2007, LNCS 4735, pp. 467–481, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 A Model-Driven Measurement Procedure for Sizing Web Applications: Design, Automation and Validation * Silvia Abrahão 1 , Emilia Mendes 2 , Jaime Gomez 3 , and Emilio Insfran 1 1 Department of Computer Science and Computation Valencia University of Technology Camino de Vera, s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain {sabrahao, einsfran}@dsic.upv.es 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand e.mendes@auckland.ac.nz 3 Department of Information Systems and Languages University of Alicante Campus de San Vicente del Raspeig. Apartado 99. 03080 Alicante, Spain jaime.gomez@ua.es Abstract. This paper introduces the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Function Points (OO-HFP), which is a functional size measurement procedure for Web projects developed using the Object-Oriented Hypermedia (OO-H) method. This method provides model-driven and transformation-based support for the development of Web applications. Using OO-HFP, a size measure is obtained once a Web application’s conceptual model is completed. We follow the steps of a process model for software measurement in order to detail the design and automation of OO-HFP. Finally, we present the validation of OO-HFP for Web effort estimation by comparing the prediction accuracy that it provides to the accuracy provided by another set of validated size measures (the Tukutuku measures) that was found to be a good effort predictor. The results of a study using industrial data show that the effort estimates obtained for projects that are sized using OO-HFP were similar to those using the Tukutuku measures, thus suggesting that the OO-HFP is a suitable effort predictor. Keywords: Model-driven development, Web Engineering, Functional Size Measurement, Web Effort Estimation, OO-H. 1 Introduction Developing Web applications is significantly different from traditional software development. The nature of Web development forces project managers to focus primarily on the time variable in order to achieve the required short cycle times. In this context, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approaches [16] seem to be very promising since Web development can be viewed as a process of transforming a * This research is supported by the META project (TIN2006-15175-C05-01), and by the FEDER.