7    SCOPE optimises your Organisations FP investment

Background

Function point counts can be used for many different purposes beyond just using them as input into estimation and productivity performance rates. These other uses include :

• Mapping package functionality to user requirements to determine ‘product’ fit
• Assigning attributes to software functionality to distinguish between high priority requirements and those that can wait and sizing the different project scopes when negotiating project scope with the user
• Recording the extent of Project Rework to justify process improvement initiatives etc.

MS Excel Counting

Spreadsheets do not enable organisations to leverage from the effort spent on counting to gain the full benefits of quantitative analysis of their software applications and projects for management decision making.

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE was designed be able to ‘flag’ functionality to be profiled for reporting.  Its method of assigning attributes is completely customisable enabling project managers to interactively determine the proportion of their software project that satisfies; one or all of the attribute combinations.  For example if the count was set up to have the following list of attributes , and they are assigned to Processes and Data Groups, then they can be selectively reported using the Boolean selection criteria of AND, OR, NOT:

• Needs to be configured
• Needs to be built from scratch
• Can be implemented directly from a package
• Is high priority to be implemented in this release
• Is built in .NET
• Has incomplete requirements etc etc etc.