Measuring Software Functional Size From Business Process Models

Abstract

ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method — ISO 19761 — which was designed to be applied both to the business application (BA) software domain and to the real-time software domain. A recurrent problem in FSM is the availability and quality of the inputs required for measurement purposes; that is, well documented FURs. Business process (BP) models, as they are commonly used to gather requirements from the early stages of a project, could be a valuable source of information for FSM. In a previous article, the feasibility of such an approach for the BA domain was analyzed using the Qualigram BP modeling notation. This paper complements that work by: (1) analyzing the use of BPMN for FSM in the BA domain; (2) presenting notation-independent guidelines for the BA domain; and (3) analyzing the possibility of using BP models to perform FSM in the real-time domain. The measurement results obtained from BP models are compared with those of previous FSM case studies.

Measuring and visualising the quality of models

“…Suggestions for quality sub-characteristics and quality metrics that can be used for this purpose have been made in [61], [62], [63] and [64]. In a similar way, measures on business process models could be used to estimate the functional size of the software that aims to support the process depicted in the model [65].…”

We Still Don’t Know How Much BPMN Is Enough, But We Are Getting Closer

“…Exploring the types of research that perused our findings, we find that the research inspired research across empirical, analytical and formal dimensions, on BPMN [6], other process modeling notations [3,7] and even other research domains such as web services [9], process mining [4] or software development, amongst others [5].…”

Measuring the Modeling Complexity of Microservice Choreography and Orchestration: The Case of E-Commerce Applications

“…Software engineering metrics have been used to evaluate different features of the software such as error prediction (Wang et al, 2011), measuring the quality of software processes (Rolón et al, 2006), measuring software functional size (Monsalve et al, 2011), and quality metrics in software design (Vanderfeesten et al, 2007). Companies use these metrics to measure the performance of their software products.…”