Should technical people count function points?
Technical people have long been the main function point counters. This made sense. Technical people often used the technique when called upon to generate estimates. Some more forward thinking technical managers used it to monitor the productivity of their departments. Truly forward thinking technologists used function points to allocate functionality when developing an application architecture or to make retain/retire/redesign decisions regarding the applications in their company’s application portfolio. Technical people should continue to be function point counters! Unfortunately, technical people have one major blind spot regarding function point counting. They know that function point counts should correlate to effort for the entire project. Therefore, they attempt to make each detail of the count correspond to the effort that they remember was, or predict will be, associated with that detail.
Technical people have long been the main function point counters. This made sense. Technical people often used the technique when called upon to generate estimates. Some more forward thinking technical managers used it to monitor the productivity of their departments. Truly forward thinking technologists used function points to allocate functionality when developing an application architecture or to make retain/retire/redesign decisions regarding the applications in their company’s application portfolio. Technical people should continue to be function point counters! Unfortunately, technical people have one major blind spot regarding function point counting. They know that function point counts should correlate to effort for the entire project. Therefore, they attempt to make each detail of the count correspond to the effort that they remember was, or predict will be, associated with that detail. For example, they remember that the help system took weeks to develop and will be uncomfor
