Testing is an important activity to ensure software quality. Big organizations can have several development teams with their products being tested by overloaded test teams. In such situations, test team managersmust be able to properly plan their schedules and resources. Also, estimates for the required test execution effort can be an additional criterion for test selection, since effort may be restrictive in practice. Nevertheless, this information is usually not available for test cases never executed before.

This paper proposes an estimation model for test execution effort based on the test specifications. For that, we define and validate a measure of size and execution complexity of test cases. This measure is obtained from test specifications written in a controlled natural language. We evaluated the model through an empirical study on the mobile application domain, which results suggested an accuracy improvement when compared with estimations based only on historical test productivity.