A survey of known experience of using COSMIC FSM for Real-Time software

Symons, C.R.

The use of functional size as a measure to make like-for-like comparisons between different software development or maintenance contracts has been common practice in administrative software for decades. In real-time software this practice is now developing. One of the reasons for these different practices in contracting, benchmarking and improvement programs is due to the fact that a lot of so-called first generation functional size measurement methods were difficult to implement in the real-time software environment [1]. This is mainly due to the fact that most of these methods largely rely on the presence of data structures in the software, while transactions are the dominant characteristic of real-time software. This document describes a number of public examples where the COSMIC method has been used successfully in the real-time software domain.