Now that you have a little understanding of what FPA is, we can
discuss the important things that they bring to your overall
software
development process.
From our experience, we've found that with a small amount of
experience, understanding the functional size of your applications
leads
to a gold mine of other information that will help you run a
successful
software development business, including:
-
The ability to accurately estimate:
- project cost
- project duration
- project staffing size
-
An understanding of other important metrics, such as:
- Project defect rate
- Cost per FP
- FP's per hour (what I refer to as "velocity")
- The productivity benefits of using new or different tools
As an example of what FPs can do for you, our company can now
tackle projects on a fixed-price basis, whereas in the last five
years
we've had only one other fixed price effort. This gives us a
significant
competitive advantage against our competition, because
most people
think
it's impossible to develop software on a fixed price
basis.