Function Points: A Critical Analysis Of The Pros And Cons Of Adoption

Through 40 years of software development, changing paradigms, and a plethora of languages, one thing remains constant: Applications professionals still struggle to find meaningful and comprehensive techniques to estimate programming effort and quantify programming productivity. Allan Albrecht of IBM developed function point (FP) sizing techniques in the 1970s as an improvement to the predominant application development sizing mechanism of the day: lines of code (LOC). Since then, some firms have embraced FPs, while others have shunned them. Are FPs an accurate and useful measurement tool, or are they a relic of the past? Proponents and critics disagree sharply over these questions and the overall pros and cons of FP analysis.