On the applicability of COSMIC-FFP for measuring software throughout its life cycle

Abstract

Software measurement plays a key role in software engineering and, to improve its performance, an organisation needs to measure software at each stage of the development life cycle. Recently, the COSMIC-FFP measurement method has been developed to improve the measurement of the functional size of a large array of software types. By quantifying software's functional user requirements, the method makes it possible to measure software from the user's viewpoint. The COSMIC-FFP measurement method has been designed based on a software functional model that can represent the functional user requirements at many levels of functional abstraction, such as software layers, functional processes and data movement sub-processes.