Function point analysis has played an important role in software measurement and analysis for 30 years, but what will be the role of function points in the future? Will they have staying power? Expanding off of a recent article for IFPUG's Metrics Views, Don Beckett looks at the QSM software project database and examines a set of validated projects counted in function points that have completed since the year 2000 to see what they tell about productivity, schedule, and staffing. We are fortunate to have several thousand projects in this sample to work with as this allows us to parse the data many different ways and still have enough projects to be statistically significant. For this study only unadjusted function points were used.
