A Semi-automated Method Of COSMIC

COSMIC as one of today's mainstream functional size measurement method is not only applied to measure business applications,but also applied to measure real-time systems and multilayer systems.As its operations are simple,and users can easily understanding its terminology without much professional background,what's more,it is applicable to all stages of software development,all these advantages result in that method becomes popular and respected by more and more companies.However,the official measurement manual provided by COSMIC only lists some principles and rules,not give out clearer measurement processes.Although many scholars have improved COSMIC in different ways,they cannot reach an agreement in measurement.To alleviate current problems,we propose a semi-automatic method of COSMIC.Our work which obey COSMIC's measurement operation principles and rules use computer tools to replace parts of artificial measurements.The main work of this paper is as follows:1.We introduced the basic situation of COSMIC,two kind of software models and three measurement phases.We pointed out the difficulties that exist in practice,given the causes of analyzing the difficulties.2.We introduced two improved methods these based on COSMIC,pointed out the difficulties and analyzed the reasons.3.Based on COSMIC and the other improved methods,We modified a set of rules.After using computer tools to replace parts of artificial measurement operations,we provide a semi-automatic method of COSMIC.4.We used our method to measure two typical cases,Showed the measurement process step by step.Then we developed experimental program and used COSMIC method and ours for measuring.After comparative analysis of the results,we obtained experimental results and verified the feasibility of semi-automatic method in practice.At last,we analyzed the unresolved issues,illustrated some special circumstances,and gave out some research directions in the future.