Case Study: COSMIC Approximate Sizing Approach without Using Historical Data

In mature engineering disciplines, international consensus can be reached on measurement, as evidenced through established measurement standards. In software engineering, there are 5 functional size measurement standards. These standards work best when the functionality to be measured is fully known, although this usually doesn't happen in the early phases of software development. The techniques most often used to approximate the sizing of the software to be developed in the early phases involve historical data. However, gathering historical data is a challenge in itself. This paper proposes the use of a fuzzy logic model to approximate the functional size of a piece of software.