Run-time measurement of COSMIC functional size for Java business applications: Is it worth the cost?

The issue of functional size measurement is crucial for software project management, and the instant measurement of functional size from source code might be beneficial for progress tracking. Since it is time-consuming and costly when functional size measurement from source code is done manually; automating the process of measurement came to the fore. In this study, runtime measurement of COSMIC functional size is aimed by the discovery of functional processes, which are triggered via user interface of a three tier Java business application. A Measurement Library has been developed to monitor the data movements occurring in the functional processes. The measurement method which requires code addition into the source code of the application for the utilization of the library is semi-automatic. In a recent study, we reported that the utilization of the library from a simple student registration system led to 92% approximate results in functional sizes measured automatically and calculated manually. Subsequently in this study, three case studies have been carried out to compare the costs of semiautomatic and manual measurements to verify if the method is worth the cost. The results have shown that the method can decrease costs up to %280 compared to the manual measurement process when it is integrated early in the coding phase. This study explains our semiautomatic functional size measurement method, details the implementation of the case studies, and overviews the results.