Functional Size Measurement with Business Process Models: the Business Application Domain

Functional size measurement (FSM) is an important component of a software project, as it provides information for estimating the effort required to develop the measured software. For planning purposes, FSM should be performed during the early stages of the project. Considering that a common use of business process models is to gather requirements from the early stages of the project, this raises the opportunity that a business process model could be a valuable source of information for FSM. This paper analyzes the feasibility of such an approach for the business application domain, including the derivation of the modeling rules for measurement purposes and the rules to map the modeling constructs of a business process modeling language into the COSMIC FSM method concepts. The results are compared with those of a previous FSM case study.