COSMIC Solver: A Tool for Functional Sizing of Java Business Applications

Abstract

Functional Size Measurement (FSM) provides a ground during software project life-cycle to estimate planning parameters and track progress. Since it is time-consuming, costly, and error-prone when functional size is measured manually, automating the process of measurement has come to the fore. The literature includes studies that automate FSM from software artifacts such as requirements specifications, design models, and software code. In this study we focus on automation of FSM from software code, and share our experience towards developing a tool called ‘COSMIC Solver’ for COSMIC FSM of Java Business Applications (JBAs). The tool automates the following steps: (i) Eliciting textual representations of UML sequence diagrams from functional execution traces of a JBA, (ii) tagging of these textual representations with the help of AspectJ technology to measure COSMIC functional size, and (iii) calculating functional size of user scenarios run in the JBA from the information on the tags according to COSMIC FSM rules. In this paper we explain features and measurement method of COSMIC Solver (v1.0), and the share results obtained from functional sizing of an open source JBA by using the tool.