Development Costs and Function Points
The Function Point is an international metric used to measure the functional weight of an application or IT project.
One of the first observations made was to determine whether there was a strong correlation between the functional size of a project and its development workload, including design, implementation, unit testing, MOA testing support, and project management.
To analyze whether a correlation exists and whether this correlation is strong, the linear regression graph is the best tool. Conducted in the same technological environment and across a set of projects of similar sizes, the analysis below shows that actual development costs are strongly correlated with the functional size of projects measured in Function Points:
This analysis shows that there is an average incompressible development load of 13 Jh in this sample, regardless of the functional size of the project (for 0 Function Points, the linear regression estimates a load of 13 Jh).
In addition to this analysis, it has been shown that the higher the number of measurements, the more relevant the regression and the more reliably the number of Function Points can be used to anticipate the workload of development projects.
