Quantitative functional change impact analysis in activity diagrams: A COSMIC-based approach

Abstract

Change requests are inevitable in every phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and responding to a change request without jeopardizing the project success remains a challenge for software developers/managers. Expressing functional changes in terms of COSMIC Function Point units can be helpful in identifying changes leading to a potential impact on the software functional size; this latter can be used as a means to plan the project activities. This paper proposes to analyze the impact of functional changes on the size of UML activity diagrams, one artifact type produced early in the SDLC. The proposed analysis handles directly as well as indirectly affected elements in both modelling levels of the activity diagrams.