Carmine GRAVINO | Web appendix SEAA 2022 - Using COSMIC to measure functional size of software: a Systematic Literature Review

COSMIC is a second generation FSM method, widely applied for estimating software development effort. However, it is still less frequently used compared to first generation methods (e.g., Function Points Analysis) and thus less consolidated in the literature. In order to highlight its usefulness, it is essential to summarize the existing evidence on how COSMIC has been employed and how it has performed through the years since its creation, both in the academia and the industry.

In this paper, we present a systematic literature review we performed to analyze the studies employing COSMIC to measure the functional size of software. In particular, the aim of our review is to understand and summarize the application of COSMIC as well as to focus on the most frequent techniques used in combination with COSMIC to build software prediction models.

The results reveal that COSMIC is widely used for software development effort estimation, which is a crucial management task that critically depends on the adopted size measure. The analysis reveals that it is considered to be suitable for a broader range of application domains, e.g., Web applications, Mobile app, with respect to 1st generation FSM method like Function Points Analysis and its adaptations/extensions. Furthermore, the review shows that a lot has been done also for automating the calculation of the functional size in terms of COSMIC, starting from software documentation available in the early phases of the development process. In the direction of simplifying the application of COSMIC, studies have also evaluated the effectiveness of its approximations, e.g., for estimating software development effort.