Functional Size Measurement Patterns: A Proposed Approach

This paper introduces the concepts of functional size measurement (FSM) patterns. These FSM patterns apply to the COSMIC FSM method and may help in solving several issues, such as being able to do an early sizing for estimation, helping inexperienced measurers in learning how to apply the COSMIC method by establishing the relationship between the method rules and the measurement results, avoiding measurement errors, and reducing measurement effort. The approach used to define FSM patterns is Design Science Research. This paper explores the motivation factors, defines the objectives of the solution, and describes the design and development of FSM patterns. FSM patterns can be defined for a portion of a functional process, a single functional process type, a set of functional process types having a main data group - or object of interest - as their common starting point, or a large set of functional processes handling multiple data groups. These types of FSM patterns have been defined as "micro FSM pattern", "basic FSM pattern", "composite FSM pattern", and "multi-composite FSM pattern" respectively. FSM patterns examples are given to demonstrate their applicability in information systems for all four FSM pattern types. Application of FSM pattern with embedded real-time systems is discussed, along with other potential usage benefits for the industry.