Mariem Haoues

Quantitative Functional Change Impact Analysis in Activity Diagrams: A COSMIC-Based Approach

Change requests are inevitable in every phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and responding to a change request without jeopardizing the project success remains a challenge for software developers/managers. Expressing functional changes in terms of COSMIC Function Point units can be helpful in identifying changes leading to a potential impact on the software functional size; this latter can be used as a means to plan the project activities. This paper proposes to analyze the impact of functional changes on the size of UML activity diagrams, one artifact type produced early in the SDLC. The proposed analysis handles directly as well as indirectly affected elements in both modelling levels of the activity diagrams.

Automated COSMIC-Based Analysis and Consistency Verification of UML Activity and Component Diagrams

UML has been established as a de facto standard for modeling software. It offers a set of complementary diagram types used to document functional, dynamic and static views of a system. UML diagrams diversification and their multi-view representation can cause inconsistencies among the diagram types used to model the system during the different development phases. This paper presents an automated COSMIC-based approach for checking the consistency between the activity and component diagrams. First, it defines measurement procedures to determine the functional size of both diagrams. Secondly, it proposes a set of heuristics to ensure the consistency in terms of COSMICFSM. Third, it presents a tool for measuring the functional size of these diagrams, and then checking their consistency.

Predicting the functional change status in UML activity diagram from the use case diagram

UML diagrams became a common part of software requirement documentation, implementation, etc. In particular, the Use Case Diagram (UCD) is considered as the de-facto standard for modelling the user requirements at an early phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Each use case can be detailed by an Activity Diagram (UAD). Because Functional Changes (FC) are inevitable during the SDLC, it is required to identify the FC status at different levels of granularity. In our previous work, we proposed an approach for measuring the functional size of a FC in the UAD using COSMIC method. In this paper, we propose to extend this approach by including the UCD. In addition, we predict the status of a FC in UAD from its use case. This approach is applied before the FC implementation. It allows a rapid and an approximate evaluation of how important the FC is and it helps designers/managers in decision-making to answer the FC request.

Analyzing Functional Changes in BPMN Models using COSMIC.

When performing functional requirements analysis, software developers need to understand the application domain to fulfil organizational needs. This is essential for making trade-off decisions and achieving the success of the software development project. An application domain is dealt within the modelling phase of the business process lifecycle. Assuming that functional changes are inevitable, we propose to use the standard COSMIC to evaluate these changes and provide indicators of change status in the business domain. Expressing functional changes in terms of COSMIC Function Point units can be helpful in identifying changes leading to potential impact on the business processs functional size. In addition, we propose a top-down decomposition approach to specify requirements and analyse change impact on BPMN models at different