Subject: Software Engineering

Topic: Matrics for Process & Projects

Difficulty: High

Both FP and LOC are units of measurement for software size. The size of a software that is subject to development is required in order to come up with accurate estimates of effort, cost and duration of a software project. Most parametric estimation models such as COCOMO accept size expressed in either FP or LOC as input.

Personally i prefer functional size of software expressed as FP for one very important reason: Size expressed using the FP metric stay constant regardless of which programming language or languages are used.

Since the industry has more than 700 programming languages and almost every application uses multiple languages, the consistency of FP metric allow economic studies that are not possible using LOC metric.

Function points can be seen as a universal IT-currency converter, giving a synthetic measure of the size of a software. For instance, it takes about 106.7 Cobol statements to construct 1 function point of software. It takes 128 C statements for the same 1 function point.