9    SCOPE protects the security of your FP Investment

Background

Most organisations have a high investment in training and valuable resource time, tied up in their function point counts, over a year this can quickly add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  

MS Excel Counting

Excel has no configuration management capability to ensure that:

• Counts are not ‘lost’ or misplaced, when they are recorded on standalone notebooks or saved to personal computer hard-drives.
• FP Analysts only use the latest validated count for reporting and when reusing a count as a template they don’t pick up an earlier version which has been subsequently corrected

To handle the complexity of managing thousands of spreadsheets for hundreds of applications organisations typically need to assign a part-time resource just to manage the security of their counts to avoid them being overwritten or lost, but accidents still occur.  This resource can cost them up to $50,000 annually.  However after the first year of counting, many organisations just ‘give up’ their function point counting activity as the overhead becomes too high to justify the returns.

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE was designed to manage the security and configuration control of counts such that an organizations function point counts can be stored in a central repository and ‘checked in’ and ‘checked out’ by the repository manager.  When concurrent counts are applied to the same baseline SCOPE has a unique capability of applying the counts in ‘layers’ such that they can be reported independently or can be merged so that the latest count information updates the baseline count rather then overwriting a previous count.