A Software Version Upgrade sized with the COSMIC ISO standard

Management Lessons Learned from a Case Study

Ling, G., Sion, S.I. Villavicencio, M. Abran, A., Desharnais, J.M.

Software upgrades triggered by portability concerns are often managed as technical code-fixing tasks and do
not use software functional size measurement standards for planning or collecting historical size-effort data for
later use in estimation and planning contexts. This paper presents a COSMIC ISO 19761-based approach to size
portability-driven software upgrade and illustrates it with the case of a Java upgrade of SimSE, an educational
software engineering game generator. The case study was organized in two phases: (1) observation and analysis
of the initial upgrade planning stage and subsequent technical conversion activities, and (2) post-upgrade
identification of the software functions modified during the upgrade, their COSMIC functional sizing, and analysis
of sizing information for planning contributions. In the upgrade planning, the Java v7 to v18 diagnosis identified
hundreds of errors and warnings, of which 93 were critical and related to wrapper constructors deprecated for
removal; this defined the upgrade conversion scope. During the post-upgrade phase, the git-diff review and
COSMIC measurement showed that 45 of the 64 SimSE functional processes had been modified, yielding 201
COSMIC Function Points (CFP) of functional changes relative to its pre-upgrade size corresponding to 72% of the
SimSE baseline functional size. Such quantitative data, based on an ISO standard, can be used to produce baseline
size-effort data for future effort estimation models for planning and benchmarking purposes.