Function point counting

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Sat Apr 13 20:23:43 UTC 2002


On Saturday 13 April 2002 01:05 pm, David Salamon wrote:
> Hmm.. That did indeed work well as a way to find the Smalltalk
> numbers, but still leaves me in the dark as far as Ruby and Python
> go... Oh well

My impression of function point analysis is that it's of most interest 
to MIS types interested in scheduling "resources" [1] for big data 
processing projects. I mean, really: count input files, output files, 
etc... for most more modern project estimation I would think you'd be 
more interested in "feature points", whose advocates claim are a 
better metric of project complexity on non-standard-DP projects.

I don't think anyone has done much research on FP on big projects in 
Ruby or Python, perhaps because most of the larger projects [2] in 
these languages have been done by Open Source types who don't worry 
about FP analysis [3].

[1] you know you're in trouble when people are referred to as 
"resources"
[2] two of the larger projects I can think of in these languages are a 
Ruby mail reader whose name escapes me and Zope, the web applications 
framework.
[3] being free for the most part from management oversight

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE




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