Project Name: The Web Object Code-counter

Sponsor:
Yue Chen (email: yuec@usc.edu)

Partners:
Winsor Brown (email: awbrown@cse.usc.edu)

Background:
A new research challenge at the Center is to estimate the cost and duration of the Web developments based on its size. To help its affiliates collect their project data, the Center plan to build a new tool for counting the web objects such as multimedia files, hyper links, etc.

Problem:
The two most popular size metrics, Function Point (FP) and Source Line of Code (SLOC), are not sufficient for web development estimation, because they do not take all the web elements such as multimedia files and cookies into account. To meet the needs from the research community and industries to quantitatively measure the size of their web development, you are supposed to build a new web object counting tool which can count as many the existing web objects as possible.

Typical Usage Scenario
Suppose there is a web site in which the user wants to know how many web objects are there included. This tool will take this web site address as an input, automatically go through each page in this site, and count the web object statistics such as the number of hyper links, the number of pictures, the number of forms, the number of scripts used, etc.

We assume you can find some good tools or open source codes to generate/collect the list of web pages that should be counted.

Constraints:
Being a research project, there is no restriction on the technical platform and the Center is open to suitable alternatives.

Desired Deliverables:
Both the web object counting tool and the appropriate documents should be packaged in the final deliverable.