Critical review of the effort rate value in use case point method for estimating software development effort

Effort estimation is an activity to estimate the number of business activities of workers as well as how long it takes to accomplish a software development project. This estimation is very important to be able to know how much the relevant value of software generated. One common method used to calculate the estimated effort is the Use Case Point (UCP). This research aim to review the UCP method, proposed by Karner in 1993, which is only based on three software development project data. However, until now, most researchers still refer to the value of the proposed Estimate Rate (ER) by Karner without questioning its relevance. In the UCP method, the estimated effort obtained from multiplying the UCP Value by the ER Value. ER Value is the ratio of staffhours required to accomplish each UCP. Karner proposed ER Value was 20 staff-hours. The final result of this research, the ER Value is equal to 8.2. This value is much smaller than the ER Value proposed by Karner. This is possible due to several reasons: 1) the existence of software engineering methods, 2) the more advanced software engineering technologies, 3) the software by component, 4) the source availability in the internet.