Automated COSMIC Measurement of Java Swing Applications throughout their Development Life Cycle

Abstract

In highly competitive organizations, measurement is crucial to control projects to meet customer requirements. Despite some successes in software, there are few mechanisms for the developers to rapidly and objectively verify and track the amount of functionality to be delivered. COSMIC - ISO 19761 functional size measurement can be used to keep track of software through its development life cycle. In this paper, we propose a “JavaCFP” plugin tool for measuring the COSMIC functional size of java source code being developed. This JavaCFP tool can be used for controlling the completeness of implemented functionality against specified requirements, for identifying deviations and for generating progress reports on the implementation of new functions. JavaCFP was developed in NetBeans IDE and the “C-REG” case study is used as an example to illustrate this plugin.

Keywords

• COSMIC method
• Functional size measurement
• Java swing application
• Automated measurement
• Plugin
• ISO 19761

Introduction

A crucial task for software project management is to evaluate what percent of the promised functionality has been completed or, while the code is being written, how much functionality remains to be developed. A timely and objective evaluation is a key factor for tracking project progress, decision making, monitoring, and so on. A project might appear to be successful if it is within the ‘approved’ budget but, without the ability to verify that all the promised functions have been delivered, there is always a possibility that only a portion of the corresponding promised functions has indeed been delivered for the budget approved for the full set of functions: therefore, when less functions are delivered within the initially estimated budget, it is then improper to claim that the budget estimates were correct [ 1 ]. Many software projects have been canceled after large investments of effort, time, and money because of both inadequate initial estimating and no objective determination of the status of the work products leading to a credible re-estimation of a completion date or the cost to complete the project for its approved scope [ 2 ].

Thus, software developers need a rapid mean to objectively measure the amount of work done. Such a measurement mean would provide all stakeholders (developers, managers, suppliers, customers, etc.) with an objective basis to monitor and control the completeness of functional requirements.

For the measurement of functional requirements, many researchers have proposed to automate the COSMIC Function Points (ISO 19761) method for the sake of less human involvement, such as in [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ], and high accuracy for the measurement tool proposed by Soubra [ 7 ] [ 8 ] in the context of software requirements documented in a specification tool format, such as in [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ]. However, these studies did not tackle the on-going monitoring of projects throughout the development lifecycle.

This paper proposes a tool for sizing java swing applications while they are being developed, and its use throughout the software development life cycle. This tool is mainly based on the COSMIC measurement process. The remaining of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents an overview of the COSMIC method and some related works on COSMIC automation. Section 3 presents the COSMIC measurement process for sizing Java Swing applications. Section 4 illustrates our measurement through the case study “C-REG” source code. Section 5 illustrates the implementation of “JavaCFP” with a comparison among tools based on metrology concepts. Finally, section 6 presents some conclusions and suggestions for further works. 2 2.1

Background

Overview of the COSMIC Method

The COSMIC – ISO 19761 method offers a standard way of sizing the functional user requirements (FUR) of all types of software developed in any type of environment. It can be applied in any of the software life-cycle phases, from the requirements to their implementation in code. Basically, COSMIC measures the software functional size from the FUR representing the “user practices and procedures that the software must perform” as mandated by ISO 14143 [ 19 ]. COSMIC defines a three-phase process for measuring the functional size of software: the measurement strategy phase, the mapping phase, and the measurement phase [ 20 ]. ─ The measurement Strategy Phase: it includes the identification of a number of measurement context parameters to ensure that the measurement results can be correctly interpreted in the future. These parameters involve the Purpose of measurement and the Scope of the software to be measured. The output of the strategy phase is the “Software Context Model” including the identification of the software Layers, their Functional users, the level of granularity of the documentation and the identification of the Persistent storage of the piece of software to be measured. ─ The mapping phase: in this phase, the FUR are mapped to the COSMIC “Generic Software Model”. Each FUR involves a number of functional processes (FP) where each consists of a set of functional sub-processes that move data or manipulate data. For instance, a data movement moves a single data group from/to a user (respectively Entry and eXit data movement) or from/to a persistent storage (respectively Read and Write data movement). ─ The Measurement phase: In this ISO standard, each data movement of a single data group is assigned a measurement unit of 1 CFP (COSMIC Function Point). The software functional size is computed by adding all data movements identified for every functional process. 2.2

Related work on COSMIC automation with Java

The automation of COSMIC method has gained interest in managing software projects: automation can help practitioners to measure objectively and quickly the size of their software through the software life-cycle, from early development phase [ 9 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 10 ] [ 5 ] [ 12 ] [ 7 ] [ 6 ] to the late coding phase ( [ 13 ], [ 14 ], [ 15 ], [ 16 ], [ 18 ]). The focus of this related work section is on FSM automation in the coding phase. For instance: ─ Akca et al. [ 13 ] proposed a semi-automated functional size measurement of the source code in "three_tier java business application" using COSMIC version 3.0.1. This measurement is achieved by the use of a self-developed "measurement library" of functional processes that are triggered via the GUI of the application. The measurement results led to 92% accuracy as compared to the manual measurement. ─ Akca et al. [ 21 ] proposed to compare the costs of semi-automatic and manual measurements of three case studies. The results showed that the automatic process can reduce measurement costs by up to 280% compared to the manual measurement when integrated at the beginning of the coding phase. ─ Sag et al. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] proposed a COSMIC measurement tool (‘Cosmic Solver’) of source or binary code. They proposed a number of rules to derive UML Sequence Diagrams from the software execution at runtime with AspectJ technology. ‘Cosmic Solver’ was demonstrated using a three-tier Java business application sample. The functional size extracted by the prototype was 96,8% convergent to the one obtained by manual measurement. ─ Gonultas et al. [ 16 ] proposed to automate COSMIC for GUI Web Java business applications based on a three-tier architecture. Like [ 13 ], the automation was limited to developing a “Measurement Library” requiring the installation of Java application code. The library can be used only for applications with a specific architecture that use technologies of JSF, Spring and Hibernate. The automated measurement converged by 94% to the manual measurement and also reduced measurement duration by about 97% (e.g., 1/34 of manual measurement effort). Small accuracy deviations were related to the technology and to the parsing method.  Source_object is a “Swing Control”  Evt_type ≡ Xxx is an event type attached to “Swing Control” (Action,

Item, Text, Menu etc.)  Listner_object is an instance of the class implementing XxxListener ─ Functional process: corresponds to the invoked event-handler or the invoked callback method (e.g. NameOfMethodActionPerformed(), NameOfMethodWindowClosing()). Once an event occurs for which there is a listener, the source event calls the method which is provided in the listener. Such a method is known as a callback method or event-handler method written as follows: public void <callback_method> (<Evt_type>Event event) { <invoked_callback_method>(event); } ─ Object of interest: An object of interest could not have only one corresponding object in Java. Assuming that each event listener interface is associated to an invoked callback method (i.e. one FP), the object of interest will correspond to the java object class. Else, it will correspond to a set of attributes derived from two or more object classes. In Java Swing the object-class is declared as public class: public class <NameOfObject> extends Object ─ Data Group: corresponds to the data fields (TextField, List, Password

Field, radioButton, etc.) describing the same object of interest. ─ Data attribute: corresponds to each data field of each object class (such as simple object, inheritance, composition, aggregation) or derived attributes from two or more object classes.

The alignment of the COSMIC concepts with those of java swing applications as described above is crucial for identifying a set of mapping rules (RP1 to RP10) in Table 2. These rules could be applied in general and used to generate the measurement rules (RM1 to RM 4) in Table 3 and (RM5 and RM6) in Table 4, and their corresponding measurement formulae. 3.3

The Measurement Phase

# Rule RM1 Each java method such as getText(), getSelectedItem(), showInputDialog(), getValueAt() should be classified as Entry data movement when triggered by the same event listener.

RM2 Each java method such as setText(), showOptionDialog(), showInternalMessageDialog(), showInternalOptionDialog(),showInternalConfirmDialog(), showMessageDialog(), NotifyDescriptor.Message(), addItem(), Append(), System.out.println() should be classified as eXit data movement and triggered by the same event listener.

RM3 Each java syntax [SELECT…executeQuery] should be classified as Read data movement and triggered by the same event listener.

RM4 Each java syntax such as INSERT…executeUpdate, delete from … executeUpdate, update… executeUpdate should be classified as Write data movement and triggered by the same event listener. # Rule RM5 The FS of the java Source code (or GUI with its FUR documentation) is equal to the sum of the sizes of its functional processes (FP).

RM6 For each Invoked Callback_Method (i.e. FP), the FS of the Invoked Callback_Method is equal to the number of its data movements. ─ First, we implemented the FUR (Maintain Student Data) of “C-REG” in NetBeans.

Due to space limitation, we present here only the GUI of the Functional Process “Add Student’s details” (Fig. 1) and its corresponding piece of code (Fig. 2) in which the extracted data movement types are presented. ─ Second, we present in details how to measure the Functional Size of the functional process (FP) “Add Student’s details” manually from the code.

By applying formula (2), the functional size of the FUR ‘Add student’s details is equal to 4 CFP - see below formula (2) for FS(“ADD Student’s details”). This measurement result is the same as provided in [ 22 ]. (_()) =

4 ∑=1 1 = 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 = 1 × + 2 × + 3 × + 4 × = 1 + 2 + 0 + 1

= 4 1 = 1 (four similar functions getText()) 2 = 2 (one setText() and two similar functions showMessageDilog()) 3 = 0 (no function associated to Read data movement) 4 = 1 (one function insert into…executeUpdate) 5 5.1

Sizing Automatically Java Swing Application

Implementation

This section illustrates the implementation of “JavaCFP” with a comparison among tools based on metrology concepts. This tool is called “JavaCFP” which is a NetBeans plugin that implements our proposed measurement formulae (section 3.3). By using this tool, software developers will be able to generate: ─ The functional size of Java Swing applications being written and after their development in the NetBeans environment (e.g., the functional sizes of each Entry, eXit, Read and Write of any java Method triggered by an event). ─ The functional size of Java Swing applications after making a functional change (i.e., the added/modified method). ─ Useful information to verify if the implemented functionality meets the COSMIC rules. Examples:  detection of missing Entry data movement in a functional process.;  information on the development progress reflecting the development of a new/modified functional process.

To illustrate how our “JavaCFP” plug-in tool works, we use as an example the piece of code associated with the “Maintain Student Data” in “C-REG” case study [ 22 ]. Fig. 3 shows the screen where the GUI functional size is generated. Note that the measurement results provided by “JavaCFP” tool are the same as those provided manually in [ 22 ].

Fig. 4 gives some snapshots of the “JavaCFP” tool. Only four interfaces are presented.

1 3 4

2

Interface 1 is used to select the piece of code to be measured. Of course, the code should be implemented in NetBeans IDE. By clicking the icon “JavaCFP” plugin in the toolbar, a dialog box appears in interface 2 asking whether the tool user wishes to keep track or not of the previous measurement results (e.g., the software functional size can be generated while the coding is in progress and after the coding is completed). In interface 3, “JavaCFP” automatically generates the functional size of the piece of code in terms of CFP units at a point in time during its development. Interface 3 also provides detailed information about the functional size of each data movement type (E, X, R, and W). Note that the real execution time (processing time) per second is provided as the program is executed. For instance, interface 3 exhibits the processing time which is about 46 seconds for 15 CFP developed including 997 LOC. These measurement results can be documented into Microsoft Excel format through Interface 4.

5.2 Comparison

In this section, we use some of the concepts from the ISO International Vocabulary on Metrology (e.g., measurement method, measurement procedure, devices for measurement, accuracy of measuring devices, and indicating measuring instrument) [ 23 ] [ 24 ] [ 25 ] as criteria for comparison among the proposed COSMIC-based tools. ─ Measurement method: since the COSMIC method behind the tool is well-designed, all the proposed tools [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 16 ] should provide the adequate functional size of swing applications. ─ Measurement procedure: it is necessary to run GUI for all the proposals [ 13 ] [ 16 ] [ 14 ].  In [ 13 ], the measurement procedure is divided into three steps. The first step consists of recording the data movement. The second one includes the discovery of functional processes. The third step consists of counting the data movements in each functional process to provide the code functional size.  In [ 16 ] the authors start with creating notifications for COSMIC data movement sub-types. After that, they identify the functional processes and calculate their CFP sizes.  In [ 14 ] four steps are proposed: (1) generate sequence diagrams from code (Java source or binary), (2) get its text version to (3) capture data movements and data manipulation through AspectJ, (4) extract the functional execution traces from user execution.  Our JavaCFP tool identifies the FUR of the selected Java Swing application (without any execution) directly from the source code in the "Source Packages". Then, for each .java file (JFrame form), we identify the triggering event from Event listener attached to "Swing Controls". Then, we identify the functional process (FP) from invoked callback_methods. For each FP, we identify the different data attributes belonging to the data groups where each data group describes the same object class. Finally, the details of measuring the functional size of each FP are provided by using measurement formulae (1) and (2). ─ Devices for measurement  [ 13 ] proposed a semi-automated measurement library for GUI Java application.  [ 16 ] proposed an automated tool “static code installer” that used a library component.  [ 14 ] proposed an automated instrument named “Cosmic Solver”.  we proposed an automated JavaCFP tool that can be used directly either when the code is being developed or after code completion. ─ Measurement accuracy: a measurement is said to be more accurate when it has a smaller measurement error.  In [ 13 ], the authors reported that the use of the library from a “student registration” system led to a corresponding ratio of 92% between the code functional sizes calculated automatically against those calculated manually.  In [ 16 ] the automatic measurement converges by 94% compared to the manual one.  In [ 14 ] numbers are quite similar with 96,8% convergence.  In our proposal, the measurement results obtained manually and automatically by “JavaCFP” are similar: it gives the details with 100% of measurement accuracy, including the same functional processes with their detailed descriptions. It guarantees the accuracy of measurement at any time during the code implementation.. ─ Indicating measuring instrument: compared to the other proposed tools in [ 13 ] [ 14 ] [ 16 ], our JavaCFP tool provides an indication of deviations (e.g., programming defects) when there is a “COSMIC rules violation” illustrating the part of the code not yet completed, and the “development progress” that indicates the current development of a new or modified functional process. 6

Conclusions

This paper has presented the JavaCFP tool that can be used as a basis to assist the developers in writing their java swing applications and generating the COSMIC functional size of that application at any time during its development lifecycle. This JavaCFP tool can be used by developers having different programming styles and even when they are not familiar with COSMIC method. A condition is that each event listener interface should be associated to only one object.

Throughout this paper, we first extracted the java concepts that can be mapped with COSMIC concepts, and generated the mapping rules, measurement rules and formulae that allow measuring manually the COSMIC functional size of swing application. After that from these formulae, we proposed the “JavaCFP” tool to help developers generate automatically the COSMIC size of swing application while it is being written. The benefits of using “JavaCFP” are not limited to generating automatically the software functional size: JavaCFP also detects which functionalities are omitted or added within a method (e.g. missing Entry), and identifies the current development progress (new or modified functional process).

Tool users can also verify the completeness of the implemented functionality against specified FUR for tracking project progress purposes. The COSMIC size of java swing application can be measured very precisely when the FUR are described without uncertainty.

In further works, we will use machine learning concepts for the identification of the objects of interest in the swing code. We will investigate the variation of measurement results when functional changes and improvements occurred in the code. We will also investigate the benefits of the proposed tool in industry, including for measuring the project productivity and the data collection for future estimation needs. an MDA Environment. the international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES '08), Andreas Jedlitschka and Outi Salo (Eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008.

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