Software enhancement must be carefully planned and quantified to satisfy customer change requests, such as adding a new functionality, or deleting or changing an existing one. This paper investigates the use of M5P Machine Learning (ML) algorithm on predicting software enhancement effort. This M5P ML algorithm is trained and tested with 302 software enhancement projects obtained from the ISBSG dataset. The correlation-based feature selection (CFS) algorithm is used to achieve efficient data reduction. Thus, the selected ML techniques are trained on a dataset with relevant features that lead to improve the accuracy of their estimates. The Performance of the M5P using CFS is compared with the three Machine Learning Regression Methods (MLRM): Gradient Boosting Regression (GBRegr), Linear Support Vector Regression (LinearSVR), and Random Forest Regression (RFR). Results show that the prediction of Software Enhancement Effort using Correlation-based Feature Selection and M5P is improved in terms of MAE (Mean Absolute Error) = 0.0612 and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) = 0.2514.

Software project scope defines functional and non-functional requirements. These requirements may change to satisfy the customers' needs. However, the control of scope creep represents one of the success keys in software project management. Changes in non-functional requirements affect the ISO/IEC 25010 quality characteristics such as security, portability, etc. Furthermore, some of these quality characteristics may evolve throughout the software life cycle into functional requirements. In this paper, we explore the use of COSMIC method - ISO/IEC 19761 to quantify and evaluate security change requests. Measuring the functional size of security change requests allows stakeholders to make appropriate decisions about whether to accept, defer, or deny the change.

To help developing continuous improvement in Information and Communication Technology, new software are required with functionality and characteristics different from the traditional one. Thus, measurement procedures need to be tailored to this new computing context. In fact, the software functional size is one of the important cost drivers of software development projects. An accurate measurement needs a detailed definition of software requirements and may require an important measurement effort. However, this is not always available. Thus, well defined measurement procedures requiring little effort and providing approximate or rapid measurement results are needed. The COSMIC Functional Size Measurement (FSM) method has knew a great success compared to other methods since it addresses different types of software including "business application", "mobile apps", etc. Moreover, it has been successfully used with UML diagrams for different objectives. In this paper, a Use Case based measurement procedure is proposed in order to estimate the functional size of mobile and web applications using COSMIC FSM method. The proposed procedure helps both beginners and experienced measurer in applying COSMIC and avoiding measurement errors. It is based on a set of measurement formulas tested and validated through the case study "Restaurant Management System".

Because of their structural and semantic inter-dependency, UML diagrams describing a software product must be consistent to ensure the success of the development process. This inter-diagram consistency is often not easy to ensure considering the multi-views the diagrams cover, the different levels of abstraction they encode, and the different development phases during which they are produced. In this paper, we tackle the consistency problem between the functional and dynamic views in behavioral diagrams of software. We propose an approach to detect and localize inter-consistency errors among UML use cases and activity diagrams. This approach is composed of two phases: measurement phase (1) and controlling phase (2). This approach is illustrated and validated through a “Restaurant management system” case study. The proposed approach will help both software designers/developers and quality assurance/testing engineers identifying and localizing the causes of software errors at early phases (specification and design).

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.

Because of software requirements play a critical role in software development projects, measuring the non-functional requirements as well as functional requirements is therefore not to be trifled with. Software security as a non-functional requirement is one of the most important quality characteristic that is recently added in the ISO 25010 quality models (previously defined as sub characteristics in ISO 9126). This characteristic must be evaluated cautiously and precisely during all the software life-cycle and especially early in the design phase. The purpose of this paper is early evaluating security in web application. To achieve this purpose, we propose to measure the quality attributes of authenticity through a combination of functional and structural size of the authenticity sequence diagram at the design phase. This combination of measurement can be used to identify the risk of violation of authenticity in web application design. An example of GeoNetwork web application is used to illustrate our proposed measurement for evaluating security as defined by ISO/IEC 25010.

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.