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I am a beginner in Software Engineering principles. This question have only academic significance.

I read about Function Point analysis.We will be getting an integer value as output for Function Point analysis.

What all things can be inferred from that output?

I know that it is an estimation technique. But couldn't understand how to read that output

user5507
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1 Answers1

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from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_point_analysis

A function point is a unit of measurement to express the amount of business functionality an information system (as a product) provides to a user. The cost (in dollars or hours) of a single unit is calculated from past projects

May be an example helps:

  • past: in the last 300 workingdays peter finished implementing features with a calculated total of 600 functionpoints.
  • from the past on average peter implemented 2 functionpoints per day.
  • presence: There is a new software feature X to be implemented that has 100 functionpoints.

Assuming that peter still has the same development velocity you can predict that the new feature will riquire 200 days.

Why using functionpoints?

calulating function point is much easier than estemaiting effort to implement a feature.

If a manager knows how to calulate the functionpoints and he knows from the past that

  • susan can do 5 functionpoints per day
  • peter can do 2 functionpoints per day

The manager can estimate how long it will take to implement the project and decide if peter or susan should do the job.

k3b
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    +1, but the last part is terrible - it should contain a remark that this is totally oversimplifying things. In real-world scenarios, the development velocity of different developers does typically vary heavily for different kinds of tasks, even a mediocre manager knows that. – Doc Brown Dec 25 '13 at 08:30