Early project estimation in the formal communication protocol development

To help industrialize the use of formal description techniques in the software development of communication protocols, improving the software project management is as equally important as improving the software development techniques. An early software project estimation is a prerequisite for the quantitative software project management to be started early in the development life cycle. However, relatively little work has been done on such an issue in the formal communication protocol development environment. This paper proposes a two-stage software sizing process and product decomposition technique for establishing Estelle specification and implementation size models tailored to the formal communication protocol development environment. Based on the size estimates obtained from the size models above, this paper also presents the practical application in conducting a software cost model COCOMO II to estimate the development cost and project schedule of the ISO ROSE protocol development.