Function Pont

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Function Point

Function Points give a measure of the functionality of the system starting from a description, in natural language, of user's requirements. Thus they provide a technology independent estimate of the size of the final program and are probably the only measure of size that is not related to the computer language, development methodology, technology or capability of the project team used to develop the system.

References to on-line resources follow:

The International Function Point Users Group has a web site at http://www.ifpug.org/ifpug.
The famous FAQ about Function Point is located at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/softcomp/fpfaq.htm.
There has been quite a bit of interest in the function point community regarding the COCOMO estimating model. Interest is growing since Barry Boehm (COCOMO's author, not related to the editor) incorporated function points into COCOMO2. While it is still under development, preliminary information on COCOMO2 is available at http://sunset.usc.edu/COCOMO2.0/Cocomo.html, along with a good version of COCOMO81 that can be downloaded for use under MSWindows.
The QA Dude website at http://www.dcez.com/~qadude contains hundreds of documents and links with information about function points and many other QA topics that are often of interest to the same people who are involved with function point analysis.
SR/Institute maintains The Software Quality Hotlist. It contains over 450 links to organizations and other information sources related to software quality control and testing. Some of these relate to software metrics in general and function points in particular. The Hotlist can be found at http://www.testworks.com/Institute/HotList/.
As the name implies, Andrew Gray's Software Metrics Links covers more than function points. It addresses many topics in the software metrics area. The site contains an extensive collection of links to software metrics researchers, organizations, software and other information sources. It can be found at http://divcom.otago.ac.nz/800/COM/INFOSCI/SMRL/people/andrew/links/metrics/metrics.htm.
Software Metrics Sites on the Web is maintained by Thomas Fetcke. It has a section on Function Point Analysis. http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~fetcke/metrics-sites.html#fpa is the URL of that section.