posted 23 years ago
George,
Given the nature of the organziation in which i work, it would be highly doubtful that we will allow such information out of our company. (the company is not a software vendor).
As to what FPA is - FPA or function point analysis is a way to obtain measures of software. As a huge oversimplification, FPA lets one measure certain characteristics within code. This allows an organization to "measure" how it commonly creates code so an organization can create a baseline (given my organization, using this methodology, with this programming language we get a score of 17.2).
As a project lead, given a baseline can compare my current project code to the baseline and see how im doing.
As a Software Process Improvment manager, is can use the baseline to determine if the changes that were suggested made positive, negative or no changes.
As a project manager, i can use the baseline to help generate the budget and timeline (how many analysts/programmers i will need and how long it will take).
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perseved problems with FPA
As project lead i get too little too late - by the time i can perform FPA i already im two years over launch date and 10 million over cost.
It is partially subjective - you need one point of view when performing FPA. I is not always a simple count, so you need to make sure that anyone doing FPA does it the same way for your organization.
FPA changes and you have to keep up, but changing may mean that historical data has lost meaning.
"i can't worry about helping future projects, i need to work on current project"