ITPEC FE Morning April 2020 Question 54

Estimating size from the counts and characteristics of external inputs, outputs, inquiries, internal logical files and external interface files — that is the function point method.

The function point method measures software size by the functions the user sees, not by code. Each of the five function types is counted and weighted by its complexity (low, average, high); the total is then adjusted by general system characteristics such as performance or distributed processing. Because it needs no code, it can be applied early, from the requirements.

Answer (c)

Why not others:

• •(a) — adding up the number of program steps (lines of code) for each program is the program step method, a code-size estimate
• •(b) — finding similar past projects and adjusting for their differences is the analogy method
• •(d) — breaking the work into a WBS and estimating each activity's person-hours is bottom-up (WBS-based) estimation

Key rule: Function points count what the system does for users (inputs, outputs, inquiries, files), so the size is independent of programming language and can be estimated before any code exists.

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