Measuring the Size of Small Functional Enhancements to Software

A requirement for productivity models and productivity analysis is to know the size of the product, or the output, of a work process. In software engineering, the product is the software itself. Function Points Analysis (FPA) has been designed to measure the functional size of software applications from a user’s perspective. While it is being used extensively to measure either medium or large software development or enhancement projects, it has not been used to measure very small functional enhancements: its current measurement structure does not allow it to discriminate small size increments. This paper describes an extended version of FPA which is proposed to address this measurement issue of lack of sensitivity to small size changes. It also presents the design and the results of an empirical study carried out using this extended version.