Messages posted by: mpalmier

Thank you both for replying to my question.

As you may have guessed I have some difficuties in identifying whether an entity should be counted as ILF by itself or as RET of another ILF.

Based on Steve suggestion I have reviewed CPM definition for entity independence and now it is clear to me that DEVICE and ATTRIBUTES have a link and ATTRIBUTES cannot be independent of DEVICE. This is also proved by the fact that once a DEVICE has been removed from the device management system also the ATTRIBUTES are deleted. But now a different question... why not counting ATTRIBUTES as DETs of my DEVICE entity?

Let's move now to APPLICATIONS. An application "comes to life" because it has been detected on a managed DEVICE. The relationship I see between DEVICE and APPLICATIONS is the same between an AUDIO CD and AUDIO TRACKS (Counting RETs). AUDIO CD should be counted as an ILF and AUDIO TRACKS as a RET. The only difference I would agree is that an AUDIO CD without TRACKS makes no sense, while a DEVICE without APPLICATIONS make sense anyway. Is this the reason why I sould count APPLICATIONS as ILF?

So, to recap:
DEVICE is ILF with 2 RETs (DEVICE, ATTRIBUTES)
APPLICATIONS is ILF with 1 RET (APPLICATIONS)

Regards,

Matteo

Hi all,

I’m a newcomer in the the Function Point Analysis. I’ve recently attended a 3-day course and now wanting to practice with real case studies from my current job. I have developed a device management system and want to apply FPA to evaluate baseline of my application.

In a device management application each DEVICE is identified by a list of ATTRIBUTES, e.g. ram size, disk size, wifi mac address and so on. The above information are displayed in the device details screen, while vendor, model, imei and operating system name are listed in the summary screen.
In the physical data model I have an entity for the DEVICE (imei, vendor, model, operating system) and an entity for APPLICATIONS installed on the device. I also have a property table to list all ATTRIBUTES of a device in form of name and value couples. The name of all possible attributes are known in advance, but the actual values and number of properties listed depend on the device capabilities.

In the attempt to identify ILF, DET and RET for this model I have the following options:

1. 1 ILF with 3 RETs (Device, Applications, Attributes) and 8 DETs (IMEI, vendor, model, app_name, app_version, app_package, attr_name, attr_value)
2. 1 ILF with 2 RETs (Device, Applications) and DETs: 3 for apps (app_name, app_version, app_package) + N for attributes (IMEI, vendor, model, ram size, disk size, wifi, mac…), being N the max number of attributes available.
3. Other options…

Which is correct according to your view?