Jochen,
Thanks for the input, I have trouble with some of the comparisons also.
I find this research interesting. I plan on doing some investigation into
the use of this "technique" and to find which, if any, companies are using
it.
Did you find the sub-link to "What Are Function Points?"
The following are the three opening paragraphs from Capers Jones', Chairman,
Software Productivity Research, Page/Paper on this subject. This link is to
the main body of the paper:
http://www.spr.com/library/0funcmet.htm#functionpoints
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The standard economic definition of productivity is, "Goods or services
produced per unit of labor and expense." Until 1979, when A.J. Albrecht of
IBM published his Function Point metric, there was never a software
definition of exactly what "goods or services" were the output of a software
project.
The previous metric for software was "cost per line of source code," which
unfortunately does not correlate at all to the economic definition of
productivity. All manufacturing managers understand that if a manufacturing
process involves a substantial percentage of fixed costs, and there is a
decline in the number of units manufactured, then the cost per unit must go
up.
Software, as it turns out, involves a substantial percentage of fixed or
inelastic costs that are not associated with coding. When more powerful
programming languages are used, the result is to reduce the number of
"units" that must be produced for a given program or system. However, the
requirements, specifications, user documents, and many other cost elements
tend to behave like fixed costs, and hence cause metrics such as "cost per
line of source code" to move paradoxically upwards instead of downwards.
------------------------------------------------
The link on my last post was just to a table comparing language
productivity, it was not directly to the main explanation of Function and
Feature Points. Sorry if this caused any confusion.
Steven
From: "Jochen Schmidt" <ยทยทยท@dataheaven.de>
> Steven L. Collins wrote:
>
> > you please post them. Of course any comments regarding the use of
> > Function Points & Feature Points are most welcome.
>
> I find it ridiculous. If counting code-lines does not even say much on
> complexity of a program in the *same* language (particularily if different
> programmers are observed) - what should I say if someone tries to compare
> e. g. Common Lisp and HTML with similar quantifications?
>
> Does this mean I should use HTML instead of Common Lisp because it has
more
> points? ;-)
>
> ciao,
> Jochen