Issues of using function point analysis method for requirement changes during software development phase

Abstract

Software go through changes at all stages of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Accepting a large amount of changes may raise the time and cost of the software. While denying changes may rise customer dissatisfaction. An effective change acceptance decision helps software project manager to decide whether to accept or reject these changes. Software effort estimation is one of the methods that helps software project manager in an efficient change acceptance decision. Several software effort estimation techniques have been introduced to date and Function Point Analysis (FPA) is one of them. FPA method is used for measuring the size and complexity of a software by calculating the functionality that the system provides its user. Many studies highlighted that FPA method is used for early phases of SDLC as compared to software development phase. During software development phase software artifacts are in inconsistent states. Therefore, it is a challenging task for software project manager to estimate the amount of required effort for a change request during software development phase. In this paper we have used FPA method in a case study for requirement changes during software development phase. This study has highlighted the main concerns of using FPA method for requirement changes during software development phase.