A Theoretical Validation of Component Point

摘要

The system-level size measures are important in software project management as tasks such asplanning and estimating the cost and schedule of software development can be performed more accuratelywhen a size estimate of the entire system is available. However, due to the black-box nature of softwarecomponents, traditional software measures are not adequate for Component-Based Systems (CBS). We havedeveloped a Function Point (FP) like measure, named Component Point (CP), for measuring thesystem-level size of a CBS specified in Unified Modeling Language. In this paper, we present a theoreticalvalidation of the CP measure using mathematics and show that not only the CP measure holds all themathematical conditions necessary for a size measure, but it can also be used in Component-BasedSoftware Development (CBSD) in a similar way that FP and its extensions are used in other softwaredevelopment paradigms.