COSMIC Method Research And Measurement Process Improve

With the development of computer technology and increasing scale of software projects, it is very important to scientific management of software projects. There is the premise of objective knowledge to software projects, the software size based on effective measurement can help to plan the projects reasonably, which can help the effective management of software projects.Two usually software size measurement methods are Lines of Code(LOC) and Function Point Analysis(FPA). The advantages of FPA method is that it can measure at any stage of software cycle, and independent of programming languages and implementation techniques. Now, the Functional Size Measurement(FSM) methods accepted as international standard by ISO/IEC are five kinds including of IFPUG, NESMA, MARK II, COSMIC, FISMA. The COSMIC method, with a great prospect, is considered second generation FSM method. It accords with the characteristics of modern software engineering. This paper will study COSMIC method.With subjectivity about software measure during the measurement, measurers having different interpretability to measurement manual would lead to inconsistent measurement results. Although the COSMIC have some advantages compared to other FSM methods, there is also the same problem in practice. We have measured software size using COSMIC method to some software requirement specifications. Combined with task practice, we have found some major problems that caused inconsistent measurement and tried to analyze the cause of these problems. There are two main reasons:A. Measurers have some deviation to understand the COSMIC measurement manual. They did not correctly use the rules and principles of COSMIC measurement.B. Measurers did not follow the measurement process, which produced negligence in measurement. For these two causes, the paper suggests the following solutions:1. To problem A, we combine concept of modern software engineering and technology with the COSMIC method, and get a consistent interpretability with COSMIC measurement manual.2. To problem B, we refine and improve the measurement process of COSMIC method so that it more reasonable, thereby it could avoid some measurement errors caused by human negligence.Finally, we measure respectively using the method proposed in this paper and the direct application of COSMIC measurement manual to the part of software requirement specification of a course registration system. Compared the measurement results with the results given by The COSMIC Measurement Practices Committee, it can be found the method proposed in this paper can improve consistency and accuracy of the measurement results to some extent.