Exploratory study on an innovative use of COSMIC-FFP for early quality assessment

Abstract

The functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard in 2003, was developed by the Common Software Measurement International Consortium (COSMIC). It focuses on the "user view" of functional requirements and is applicable throughout the development life cycle. As some of the software systems targeted by COSMIC-FFP are large-scale and inherently complex, feedback on their functional complexity would facilitate containment of that complexity throughout the software life cycle. In this thesis, a new early quality assessment of COSMIC-FFP models is proposed. The benefits of this work include earlier prediction of the functional complexity of the behavior of software in the COSMIC-FFP context, right from the requirements phase, as well as a mechanism for generating black-box test cases from the COSMIC-FFP model, test case prioritization and test set adequacy monitoring and optimization within given budget constraints, and an early prediction of reliability based on Markov chains. We also present a study of the scales, units and scale types of both COSMIC-FFP and the Entropy-based Functional Complexity Measure that forms the basis of the testing assessment method we propose here. Previous studies have analyzed the scale types of many pieces of software, but not the concept of scale itself, nor how it is used in the design of a measurement method. Two well-known case studies are introduced to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methods: the Hotel Accommodation System and the Railroad System. We include a formalized COSMIC-FFP definition in the AS-TRM context