Automated Enhancement Points

Automated Enhancement Points is a standard measure of software size to be used in productivity analysis and the sizing of software maintenance activities. As of October 2016, the specification is an official standard of the Object Management Group® (OMG®).

Access the OMG® standard here: https://www.omg.org/spec/AEP/

The Automated Enhancement Points specification was published after the Automated Function Point (AFP) standard delivered by CISQ in 2013. Automated Enhancement Points improves the measurement of software size for use in productivity analysis by measuring both the functional and non-functional size of software. This is a significant advancement in automated software sizing that solves problems that functional size measures have experienced in analyzing productivity during maintenance and enhancement activities.

With these two standards for function point analysis and software sizing, organizations can:

  • perform software quality and productivity analysis
  • enable users to determine the ROI of an application by sizing the functionality that specifically matches the requirements of their organizations
  • calibrate estimating methods against the results of past estimates
  • measure and manage contracts and agreements with system integrators and outsourcers
  • normalize data used in software benchmarks
  • determine the size of a purchased application package (COTS or customized system) by sizing all the code included in the package