On the Conversion between the Sizes of Software Products in the Life Cycle

Various measures and methods have been developed to measure the sizes of different software entities produced throughout the life cycle. Understanding the nature of the relationship between the sizes of these products has become significant due to various reasons. One major reason is the ability to predict the size of the later phase products by using the sizes of early life cycle products. For example, we need to predict Source Lines of Code (SLOC) from Function Points (FP) since the size of code in SLOC is being used as the main input for most of the estimation models when this measure is not available. Similarly, FP has recently started to be used to predict the Bytes of code for estimating the amount of spare processing capacity in systems. However, despite there exists a few studies, the relationship between these size measures are actually not very well-known. In this paper, we aim to investigate the nature of the relationship between the software functional size and the code size by conducting empirical studies.