Most practitioners of Function Point Analysis (FPA) will probably
agree that there are three main objectives within the process of FPA:
- Measure software by quantifying the functionality requested by
and provided to the customer.
- Measure software development and maintenance independently of
technology used for implementation.
- Measure software development and maintenance consistently
across all projects and organizations.
In working towards objectives 2 and 3 above, several
organizations
have created large repositories of FP counts that cross
projects,
technologies, and organizations. These repositories can be an
invaluable tool for your first estimation efforts, because it lets
you
compare your project to similar projects that have been developed
by
other organizations around the world.