SCOPE What does it do?

SCOPE is a software project management and Functional Size measurement tool that supports the IFPUG 4.2 and IFPUG 4.3 Function Point Counting (Function Point Analysis) methodology. It is a powerful combination of easy to use features and comprehensive functionality. SCOPE makes it easy to measure the Functional Size of software applications and software projects.

Function Point Counting

If you need to measure the Functional Size of an existing software application or project, then SCOPE allows you to simply input your application name, the name of the release and open the count to record the type and complexity of Processes and Data Groups and calculate the functional size. Simple Function Point Analysis counts like these may be all that is required, but SCOPE is designed to do much more towards providing an audit trail to monitor and control your project’s progress and the growth of an application over multiple releases during its lifetime.

Modelling Your Project SCOPE enables logical groups of Functions and Processes to be visually mapped out as nodes on a hierarchical tree, providing a detailed view of a project’s functionality and the relative size of each functional area. This capability to expand or collapse functional branches allows you to see as little or as much detail on one screen as you wish.

• You can find out the size of any functional area within an application by clicking on a branch node and checking the Function Point count in the status bar.

• You can quickly and easily gain an overview of an application’s functionality by expanding or collapsing the relevant part of the tree.

Project Management

By usingSCOPE in theinitial stages of project development, you can model your planned software’s functionality in higher level Functions, and easily evaluate the impact of a particular decision to include or exclude functions.

As a project evolves,SCOPE supports you as you add detail and decompose the Functions down into Processes. Additionally, SCOPE supports complex development cycles with multiple change requests within the same release, and multiple software versions in production. It acts as a software asset register. It enables you to keep a ‘functional’ history of each application by providing a documented audit trail of changes to the software throughout its life. Traceability and being able to quantify changes is particularly important for contract negotiations of pricing variations in outsourced development.

During a software development project, uninformed decisions can lead to inconsistent and incorrect resource allocation that can ultimately jeopardise the project’s outcome. For example, a project’s success in terms of remaining within budget and time constraints can sometimes mean sacrificing functionality. These trade-off decisions are made more difficult without some way tomeasure and compare functionality across different parts of the application being developed. SCOPE allows you to easily do this “what-if” analysis, and selectively size different functions and data and thus make informed management decisions on the impact of SCOPE changes; plus you will have a record that enables those decisions to be justified, if required later.