2.4 a system of reference for software measurements with ISO 19761

Abstract

Software measurement is still emerging as a field of knowledge, and, most often, traditional quality criteria of measurement methods such as repeatability, reproducibility, accuracy and convertibility are not even investigated by software measurement method designers. In Software Engineering, the Functional Size Measurement (FSM) community has been the first to recognize the importance of such quality criteria for measurement, as illustrated in the recently adopted ISO document 14143-3; these criteria represent, however, only a subset of the metrology criteria which includes, for instance, measurement units and internationally recognized measurement references (e.g. etalons). In this paper, a design for building a set of normalized baseline measurement references for COSMIC-FFP (ISO 19761), the 2nd generation of FSM methods, is proposed. The goal is to design, for the first time in Software Engineering, a system of references for software FSM methods.