Service-oriented architecture (SOA) expresses a perspective of software architecture that
defines the use of loosely coupled software services to support the requirements of business
processes and software users. In a SOA environment, resources on a network (e.g. web
services) are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge
of their underlying platform or programming language. When measuring the functional size
of a distributed application in a SOA environment, we must face the “boundary positioning”
issue. 1st generation FSM methods easily fail in providing a good answer to this question,
since they lack a conceptual framework provided by new generation methods, as COSMIC
Software applications are not monolithic (anymore),
layers, peer items, and functions between them, should be considered, to provide a more
accurate answer to the sizing question, and hence to the software estimation problem.

This document describes the boundary problem from the software measurement
perspective, and provides basic guidelines for the application of the COSMIC Function
Point sizing method in a SOA environment.