Towards a functional size measure for object-oriented systems from requirements specifications

This work describes a measurement protocol to map the concepts used in the OO-method requirements model onto the concepts used by the COSMIC full function points (COSMIC-FFP) functional size measurement method. This protocol describes a set of measurement operations for modeling and sizing object-oriented software systems from requirements specifications obtained in the context of the OO-method. This development method starts from a requirements model that allows the specification of software functional requirements and generates a conceptual model through a requirements analysis process. The main contribution of this work is an extended set of rules that allows estimating the functional size of OO systems at an early stage of the development lifecycle. A case study is introduced to report the obtained results from a practical point of view.