Formalization studies in functional size measurement : how do they help?

Functional size has been favored as a software characteristic that can be measured early and independent of language, tools, techniques and technology; hence has many uses in software project management. It has been about three decades since Albrecht introduced the concept of functional size. However, Functional Size Measurement (FSM) has not been a common practice in the software community. The problems with FSM method structures and practices have been discussed to be the major factors to explain this situation. In this paper, we make a review of formalization proposals to the problems in Functional Size Measurement (FSM). We analyze the works included in the papers and we explore the extent of their contributions.