COSMIC method update - free conference - award nominations

Hopefully you are in good health in these challenging times. You may not have heard much from me personally, but a lot has happened over the past months. We will keep the news here short and provide you with links to the details:

Egypt has now joined the International Advisory Council as the 27^th country where COSMIC is represented. The IAC member for Egypt is Hassan Soubra from the German University in Cairo.

In France, Eric Bronca from Renault has indicated that he is no longer actively involved in using functional size measurement. Fortunately, Patrick Hamon from Estimancy is prepared to represent the COSMIC organization in France. I hereby thank Eric Bronca for his contributions and officially welcome Patrick Hamon to the IAC.

In México, Carlos Duarte has indicated that he is no longer in a position to actively support the COSMIC method. We are grateful that Ricardo Cardenas of Coppel is willing to take over the position of IAC-representative of the COSMIC organization in México. I hereby thank Carlos Duarte for his contributions and officially welcome Ricardo Cardenas to the IAC.

To promote the COSMIC method we have set up a social media campaign on LinkedIN and Twitter. If you are active on one or both of these platforms, please follow COSMIC and like, share or retweet our messages, so that news about the COSMIC method is also shared in your network. Messages are planned to go live on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So watch out for them.

We are also working hard behind the scenes to make the website more attractive and easier to navigate for first-time users of the COSMIC method. Launch is expected somewhere in June.

Last week the bidding was finalized for the new major software tender for eu-LISA, the EU agency that develops and maintains large IT-systems in the area of freedom, security and justice. The value of this tender is nearly 1 Billion euro for the next four years. The work packages on Software Development (valued at 187 million euro) will be contracted with a procurement method based on Functional Size Measurement. This is a very significant vote of confidence in the use of Functional Size Measurement to manage software development contracts and for the COSMIC Functional Size Measurement method in particular. Hopefully eu-LISA has set a trend in the way the European Union and its constituting governments will procure software contracts in the future. Read the details.

To make the COSMIC method better accessible the COSMIC Group has released version 5.0 of the Measurement Manual for measuring the functional size of a software using ISO 19761. This version 5.0 of the COSMIC Measurement Manual is not a change of the COSMIC method itself, but a re-organization of the documentation of the COSMIC measurement method.

The COSMIC method provides a standardized way of measuring a functional size of software. In practice, it is at times sufficient or necessary to approximate a functional size. Therefore we have published two guides for Early or Quick software sizing with COSMIC. The first guide is aimed at practitioners and contains the information to get started right away. If you are interested in all the details, we also offer the expert guide.

The COSMIC Group has released the Non-Functional Requirements and COSMIC Sizing Practitioner’s Guide. The purpose of this guide is to illustrate that system non-functional requirements (system-NFRs) may be allocated in projects as software functional user requirements and to demonstrate how to specify and measure, using COSMIC Function Points, the functional size of software-FURs that were system-NFRs.

Certification exams in times of COVID-19

Because of the restrictions that are in place to stop the COVID-19 pandemic certification exams cannot be organized in the usual way with human proctors to oversee the exams. The Certification committee has developed an online proctoring option, so you can take your COSMIC Foundation Level exam when you are ready for it. So you don't have to wait for an exam to be organized. Read the details.

The 8^th annual ISBSG Confidence Conference on software data collection, analysis, and benchmarking will be organized via Zoom, so you can attend safely from your laptop or mobile device. This first virtual IT Confidence conference is free of charge for everybody to attend on:

It is still uncertain whether the IWSM conference can be held as a physical conference in October in México.
We would like to present this year’s COSMIC awards at the conference. This year we would like to present the following awards: