By Tracie Berardi, Program Manager, Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ)
In January 2013 CISQ published a specification for Automated Function Points (AFP) that enables the automated sizing of software by function points. The spec was developed by an international team led by David Herron of the David Consulting Group. The CISQ AFP spec was designed to be as similar as possible to the IFPUG Counting Guidelines, but also to be objective so counts are consistent (the same every time) and can be automated for use in tools. You can learn more about AFP here.
In 2015 CISQ begins work on a specification for Automated Enhancement Function Points (AEFP). The existing AFP specification is not suitable for productivity analysis, as it does not solve the problem of measuring maintenance work which does not change the total number of function points even after substantial changes to the code.
The primary challenge is to identify a counting or weighting method for AEFPs that is correlated with maintenance effort – i.e. small changes should produce small AEFP counts, while large changes should produce large AEFP counts. The method and weighting schemes will be consistent with the theory and methods of function point counting, with a primary focus on consistency with the IFPUG Counting Guidelines.
The objective for CISQ is to create a specification that can be approved as a supported specification of the Object Management Group (OMG).
The project team consists of CISQ sponsors from CAST Software, Huawei, Wipro, Accenture, and Atos.