Estimation for Mobile and Cloud Environments

Estimation for Mobile and Cloud Environments

Frank Vogelezang, Jayakumar Kamala Ramasubramani, Srikanth Arvamudhan
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 27
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9916-8.ch004
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Abstract

Estimation of Cost, Effort and Schedule is a very important aspect in commercial software development. Effort is usually the predominant cost driver in software development. The dominant determinant for effort is the size of the software to be developed. There are various ways to determine the size of software. The best option is to use a standardized measure for the functional size. In this chapter the COSMIC method for functional size is introduced. Due to its basic principles, the COSMIC method enables determination of the functional size of mobile and cloud-based applications. This chapter demonstrates how the COSMIC method provides a good basis for the estimation of Cost, Effort and Schedule in mobile and cloud environments.
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Background: Functional Size

Organizations engaged in software engineering have struggled for years in search of acceptable quantitative methods for measuring process efficiency and effectiveness, and for managing software costs, for the systems they acquire, develop, enhance or maintain. One critical, and particularly elusive, aspect of this measurement requirement has been the need to determine software size. In 1998, the concept of functional size was defined in an International Standard (ISO, 2007).

Functional size is a measure of the amount of functionality provided by the software, derived by quantifying the user practices and procedures that the software must perform to fulfill the users’ needs, independent of any technical or quality considerations. The functional size is therefore a measure of what the software must do, not how it should work. This means that the functional size can be determined before the actual software has been built, and even before there is a final decision on what platform the software will be built and in which programming language.

The concept of functional size is therefore an ideal basis for comparison, either between software with similar characteristics or for cross-platform comparison. These different types of comparison can be useful for development or maintenance benchmarking or to support decisions on platform choices.

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