Investigating functional and code size measures for mobile applications: A replicated study

Abstract

In this paper we apply a measurement procedure proposed by van Heeringen and van Gorp to approximate the COSMIC size of mobile applications. We compare this procedure with the one introduced by D’Avanzo et al. We also replicate an empirical study recently carried out to assess whether the COSMIC functional size of mobile applications can be used to estimate the size of the final applications in terms of lines of code, number of bytes of the source code and bytecode. The results showed that the COSMIC functional size evaluated with van Heeringen and van Gorp’s method was well correlated to all the size measures taken into account. Nevertheless, the prediction accuracy did not satisfy the evaluation criteria and turned out ot be slightly worse than the one obtained in the original study and based on the approach proposed by D’Avanzo et al.