## 2 Background
### Recent Studies on Web Size Metrics and Effort Estimation  
The literature on web size metrics, such as the authors in [22; 23; 24; 25], often focuses on counting elements, such as the number of web pages, number of web objects, JavaScript files, HTML files or lines of code, number of graphics media used on a page, number of links per page, and media files within a web application. Such web size metrics can be deceptive because they lack standardization and are highly dependent on programming languages, making it difficult to consistently apply them across different projects or to make meaningful comparisons. Consequently, these metrics do not offer objective, replicable, and reproducible measurements of the actual size of software web applications, thereby supporting the need for more advanced and function-based measurement approaches, such as COSMIC. Early studies using COSMIC on web software applications have demonstrated its usefulness in measuring functional size and estimating the development efforts for dynamic web applications [12; 13; 26; 27; 28]. The authors in [29] evaluated the use of the Web-COBRA method in conjunction with COSMIC to estimate the development effort of web applications. This study examined web applications on e-government, e-banking, web portals, and intranet applications and investigated the effectiveness of Web-COBRA when combined with COSMIC. These findings confirm that using Web-COBRA in combination with COSMIC provides more accurate predictions for effort estimation than simpler methods. The authors in [30] investigated the impact of individual COSMIC Base Functional Components (BFCs) on estimating web application development efforts. The findings suggest that when quick estimates are needed, relying on the size of a single BFC type might be sufficient. The authors in [31] introduced a procedure for measuring the COSMIC functional size of web applications developed using the Object-Oriented Hypermedia (OO-H) method and UML class diagrams to capture the structural aspects of web applications. COSMIC concepts were mapped to OO-H models, and the results showed the potential for improving effort estimation in model-driven web development. Similarly, the authors in [32] explored the possibility of using COSMIC in combination with a UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) approach to estimate the functional size of web applications and found it useful. In addition, the authors in [15] discussed a method for estimating the effort required to develop web applications using COSMIC in combination with conceptual models created using UML-based Web Engineering (UWE). The proposed algorithm calculates the data movement within a web application and indicates that COSMIC is effective for early effort estimation in web application development. Figure 1: Data flow in a web analytics implementation using Google Tag Manager (GTM). The authors in [33] assessed the usefulness of COSMIC in estimating the effort required to create web applications during the early stages of a development project. The study compared two early sizing techniques, the COSMIC Functional Processes (CFunP) technique and the Average Functional Process (AFP), to determine their ability to predict development effort in comparison to the standard COSMIC method and baseline benchmarks. The findings show that the standard COSMIC method provides more precise sizing and effort estimations, indicating that although early sizing is valuable for early predictions, the standard method should be employed for more accurate effort estimations as the project advances. Other studies on web size metrics and effort estimation reported the following:  
* The authors in [7] posit that COSMIC surpassed IFPUG Function Points (ISO 20926) in providing significantly better estimations when combined with Simple Linear Regression (SLR) and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) as estimation techniques.