Software complexity originates in the size of the software and the unpredictability (uncertainty) of software's behavior. At the early phases of software development, we can quantify the size of software functionality from the functional requirement specifications. A functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard, was developed by the Common Software Measurement International Consortium (COSMIC), and focuses on the "user view" of functional requirements and is applicable throughout the development life cycle. On the other side, functional complexity characterizes the dynamic performance of the system seen, as a scenario required fulfilling a certain functionality of the system. The software systems targeted by the COSMIC-FFP method are large-scale and inherently complex, feedback on their functional complexity would permit effective containment of complexity throughout the software life cycle. In this research proposal, a new entropy-based measurement is proposed for quantifying the uncertainty of software behavior described in the scenarios of usages of software system. The benefits of this work include earlier prediction of the functional complexity of software's behavior right from the requirements phase, a mechanism for generating black-box test cases and their prioritization, and early prediction of reliability.

Dr Ormandjieva has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria (1987), and a Ph.D. in Science from the Concordia University (2002). The research interests of Dr Ormandjieva are in the area of formal methods and software engineering, more specifically in software measurement for the real-time reactive systems and the aspect-oriented software development. [an error occurred while processing this directive]