Function Point Analysis: Are Your Development Goals Being Met?
How productive is your development team when updating or implementing new software? How predictable are your fix times? Does the business continually complain about time to market of new features? If your company does not know the answers to these questions, then several cost saving opportunities and ADM improvements could be slipping right past you.
What is Function Point Analysis?
Function point analysis is the process of sizing software based on the number of business functions an application must accomplish. It eliminates the need to tediously go through each line of code to determine if an application meets business needs and has the required quality. Function Point Analysis provides your organization with the ability to:
- Establish Development Team Productivity Baseline
- Track Productivity Over Time
- Identify Process or System Inefficiencies
- Measure Process Improvement Effectiveness
Function point analysis metrics make it possible to accurately measure productivity and developer efficiency over specified time frames to gain insight on current development activities. This form of analysis is applicable at any point in the development phase.
Using Function Point Analysis Software to Improve Productivity
Function point analysis software offers an automated solution to the task of evaluating a codebase. It also makes the tedious process of identifying, classifying, and measuring end-user needs an easy task. Function points are a unit of measurement used to quantify and measure end-user requirements within an application. Function point analysis is applied to quantify and measure several items:
- Received Functionality
- Team or Individual Productivity
- Vendor Performance
Function point analysis software provides the insight an organization requires to identify improvement areas within the software development process. By using the results from this assessment, your organization will be able to reduce maintenance costs, mitigate risks, and get more from the development team.
Additional function point analysis benefits are the ability to assess the size of an application and to evaluate its ability to meet business or user requirements. It also serves as a productivity solution for evaluating the work completed by your team based on defined units.
CAST offers a function point analysis solution to help with these typical organizational struggles. Our Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) is an option for assessing internally or externally developed applications and finding beneficial areas of improvement within your infrastructure.