Implementation of COSMIC Function Points (CFP) as Primary Input to COCOMO II: Study of Conversion to Line of Code Using Regression and Support Vector Regression Models

Abstract

In COCOMO II, the primary input for estimating development effort in person month (PM), duration, and cost is the size of the software. Until now, there are two ways to get the size, namely (1) size is estimated using a line of code of software, and (2) size is estimated using unadjusted function points (UFP), which is one of the functional size measurements (FSM). In this study, we added a new way to obtain the size as the primary input in COCOMO II, namely with COSMIC function points (CFP). CFP has several advantages compared to other FSMs, including UFP. Therefore, like UFP, CFP is converted first to LOC, so the conversion equation must be obtained first. We applied four models to get the conversion functions: Ordinary least squares regression (OLSR), support vector regression (SVR) with linear, polynomial, and Gaussian kernel functions. The four models were applied using a dataset from small-scale business application software in Java. The results showed that PM estimation using the CFP model as the primary input produced better accuracy based on MMRE and Pred (0.25), namely 17%-19% and 67%-80%, than the UFP model on the COCOMO II of 135% and 10%.