Investigating Functional and Code Size Measures for Mobile Applications

This paper investigates the use of the COSMIC functional size measurement method for mobile applications. Some proposals have been recently introduced to size mobile applications in terms of COSMIC. In this work we empirically analyse whether the COSMIC functional size of mobile applications can be exploited to estimate the size of the final applications in terms of lines of code and number of bytes of the source code and byte code. To this end, we take into account a total of 7 different code size measures collected from 13 Android applications. The results of the empirical study show that the COSMIC functional size is strongly correlated to all the size measures taken into account and that it can be also used to predict the mobile application size in terms of bytes with a high accuracy.