Functional Size of Use Case Diagrams: A Fine-Grain Measurement

Abstract

Software functional size (FS) prediction early in its lifecycle is vital for software project management. Such prediction requires the definition of software measures in terms of the specification and/or design language concepts. Within this context, several researchers have projected COSMIC functional size measures (FSM) onto various UML diagrams. However, these projections treated the diagrams separately despite their syntactic and semantic overlap within a model. In this paper, we present a fine-grain measurement for the UML use case diagram. Being a central diagram for models derived through the Unified Process, the use case diagram is implicitly related to all other diagrams. Thus, the detailed measurement of this diagram provides a reference measurement standard for other UML diagrams, e.g., the sequence and class diagrams.

A measurement method for sizing the structure of UML sequence diagrams

“…Sellami and Ben-Abdallah [13] presented an approach to measure the functional size of use case diagrams and stressed the importance of the semantic links among the various UML diagrams in any measurement process. In particular, they proposed to use the functional size of the use case diagram as a reference for sizing the sequence and class diagrams, i.e.…”

“…First, it completes our previous work [13] with a new measurement method for the structural size of sequence diagrams at a finer level of granularity, i.e. the size of their control structures described through the alt, opt, or loop constructs.…”

“…These studies explored the functional size of UML diagrams at a high level of granularity and without taking into account the details expressed at a finer level: for instance, [13,14,16] do not include either the specific details in the combined fragments of these diagrams which represent the behavioral aspects of software, or their usefulness in more extensively representing the user requirements.…”

Design test process in component-based software engineering: an analysis of requirements scalability

“…First, to measure the functional size of this use case, we use the UML-UC description given in [13] and reformulated according to the meta-model proposed by [1] (see " Figure 4"). Secondly, we measure the functional size of the same use case using its UML-CM.…”

Empirical and Theoretical Validation of a Use Case Diagram Complexity Metric

“…Yavari et al [35] proposed use case complexity metrics to find use case weight on the basis of use case type, priority, goals, scenarios, related entity database and business rules. Sellami et al [41] have proposed a measurement technique by using set of scenarios and take into account the relationships among the use cases to some extent. A metric called use case point given by Karner [46] classified the use cases into groups based on subjectively determined size or complexity and then used for other kind of estimations.…”