The benefits of Function Point Analysis

Now that you have a little understanding of what FPA is, we can discuss the important things that they bring to your overall software development process.

From my experience, I've found that with a small amount of experience, understanding the functional size of your applications leads to a gold mine of other information that will help you run a successful software development business, including:

1. The ability to accurately estimate:
   1. project cost
   2. project duration
   3. project staffing size
2. An understanding of other important metrics, such as:
   1. Project defect rate
   2. Cost per FP
   3. FP's per hour (what I refer to as ``velocity'')
   4. The productivity benefits of using new or different tools

As an example of what FPs can do for you, my company, Mission Data, can now tackle projects on a fixed-price basis, whereas in the last five years we've had only one other fixed price effort. This gives us a significant competitive advantage against our competition, because most people think it's impossible to develop software on a fixed price basis.