2.4 SUMMARY

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2.4 SUMMARY

Function Point Analysis is a measurement technique that has been adopted by a large number of data processing organizations and some efforts have been made to apply FPA to real-time environments. The technique consists of various steps which together produce or derive a measure of system or project size.

The COSMIC approach is a newly emerging variant of Functional Sizing Metric that is providing initially very good results for both the data processing and real time communities.

Because of the widespread use of FPA and the fact that it has been in the public domain for some time there are many variants of FPA and numerous misconceptions. Used correctly FPA can be a valuable component of a measurement initiative but it should not be seen as the totality of such an initiative.

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