COSMIC Functional Sizing based on UML Sequence Diagrams
Thomas Fehlmann, Eberhard Kranich · 2011
Agile Teams use UML sequence diagramming to communicate their designs with customers and sponsors. It is tempting to count functional size directly from UML sequence diagrams, once these are available. However, what are the caveats and risks? To understand this, the authors have made a fictional case exercise, looking at a typical software problem of today involving web services and social media integration. It turns out that the COSMIC Measurement Method – although ten years old – provides not only functional sizing but encourages good software engineering practices such as sequence diagramming. This paper provides an overview of what has been done so far and presents and reviews experiences made with the COSMIC methodology (ISO/IEC 19761:2011) in the COSMIC community when counting sequence diagrams.