Function Points

In chapter 12 of the book The Deadline, a numbers man appears into place. This new character which is introduced very fast also ends its appearance in a flash, goes to the point of his work and helps Tompkins’ dream team. This man, called T. Jons Caporous, is presented as an incredible person with mathematics and analytics. Even when he was working, he said random facts but important about Morovia, software engineering and data analysis.

When he arrived and met Tompkins, he started working on calculations with all the projects that were going to be developed. Tompkins was confused about what was Caporous really doing. Time passed and at the end this man showed everyone else on the team something new called function points. The work he had done was a table of all the software that was being developed and the functions points of each one of them.

Everyone was asking about the purpose of this new data, except from Binda which new exactly the impact of this new discovery. If one goes back some chapters, we can remember that hunches and processes could be modeled to make a more assertive interpretation of how will be de progress of a software team. So now, with this data about function points, one could add these numbers and make a pipeline of function developments that explained and interpreted better the performance of the team.

What I most liked and learned from this chapter is that you must size every single product. Is is important to have a quantification of how many functions and requirements a project has. You can make a mix of characteristics of the software and other metrics to make this function points and use them to make models of the software production. Also, this technique helps to evaluate how much the project is being developed.

Another thing to have in mind is the collection of archeological data. This means to take advantage of trends from projects that are already finished to have a better formulation of this synthetic metrics. In the chapter there are called function points but in reality they can be called however you want. The objective here is to have the best correlation of effort and the archaeological data.

Finally, I learned that the main objective of these generated metrics is to estimate a project completely. By giving it a size and picking off expected effort from the trend line, one can have an indicator of projections of the project. This, in a productivity analysis, helps a lot to find tolerance of time and effort values in the projects.