A Software Version Upgrade sized with the COSMIC ISO standard: Management Lessons Learned from a Case Study

RésuméAbstract

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.

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CiterCite

@inproceedings{guo2026a,
  title = {A Software Version Upgrade sized with the COSMIC ISO standard: Management Lessons Learned from a Case Study},
  author = {Ling Guo and Sion Israel Sion and Alain Abran and Monica Villavicencio and J. M. Desharnais},
  booktitle = {IWSM 2026 (main conference)},
  year = {2026}
}

HistoriqueHistory

1. 2026Accepté et présenté à IWSM 2026, Best Paper AwardAccepted and presented at IWSM 2026, Best Paper Award