Early & Quick Function Point: Sizing More with Less

The Early & Quick technique was originally proposed in 1997 for IFPUG Function Points, to size software in early stages of the development process, when functional requirements are still to be established in a detailed form and/or when a rapid measure is needed for existing software from a high-level viewpoint, within limited time. Typical lack of measurement details and requirements volatility in early project stages are overcome by the E&Q approach to provide a size estimate as a significant contribution to early project planning needs. Fundamental principles of the technique are classification by analogy, functionality structured aggregation, and multilevel approach, with statistical validation of numerical ranges. Recently, the technique has evolved, to fully comply with any Functional Size Measurement method (ISO/IEC 14143:1998), so to cover new generation methods (e.g. COSMIC Full FP 2.2) and updated releases of existing methods (e.g. IFPUG FP 4.1 and 4.2). This paper describes the current technique release 2.0, application cases, validation results, supporting tools, and further improvement directions.

[1]  Jeffrey C. Carver,et al.  Combining self-reported and automatic data to improve programming effort measurement , 2005, ESEC/FSE-13.

[2]  Jeffrey C. Carver Studying code development for high performance computing: the HPCS program , 2004, ICSE 2004.

[3]  Thomas L. Sterling Productivity Metrics and Models for High Performance Computing , 2004, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl..

[4]  Marvin V. Zelkowitz,et al.  Lessons learned from 25 years of process improvement: the rise and fall of the NASA software engineering laboratory , 2002, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2002.

[5]  Roberto Meli Early and quick function point analysis from summary user requirements to project management , 2002 .

[6]  Alain Abran,et al.  On the applicability of COSMIC-FFP for measuring software throughout its life cycle , 2000 .

[7]  Roberto Meli,et al.  FUNCTION POINT ESTIMATION METHODS: A COMPARATIVE OVERVIEW , 1999 .

[8]  Qin Zhang,et al.  Practical automated process and product metric collection and analysis in a classroom setting: lessons learned from Hackystat-UH , 2004, Proceedings. 2004 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, 2004. ISESE '04..

[9]  Roberto Meli Early and Extended Function Point: a new method for Function Points estimation , 1997 .

[10]  David A. Bader,et al.  A Framework for Measuring Supercomputer Productivity , 2004, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl..

[11]  R. Meli,et al.  Q : An Early & Quick Approach to Functional Size Measurement Methods , 2004 .

[12]  Early estimating using COSMIC-FFP , 2004 .

[13]  Mark F. Adams,et al.  Ultrascalable Implicit Finite Element Analyses in Solid Mechanics with over a Half a Billion Degrees of Freedom , 2004, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE SC2004 Conference.

[14]  Ken Kennedy,et al.  Defining and Measuring the Productivity of Programming Languages , 2004, Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl..