Function-point Analysis and APL: January 13th at the Royal Over-Seas League

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 79

Introduction¶

Another well-attended and well-run meeting; what’s more we even had the computing press along, and got a reasonably visible splash in ‘Computing’ as a result.

Romilly Cocking gave us an introduction to the benefits of FPA, based mainly on a recent conference in the USA. Alan Williams of IBM followed with a more detailed description of the technique, and finally Maurice Jordan (British Airways) gave us a brief case study of the use of FPA on a small APL project.

The overall message was that FPA tends to measure APL projects as around 10 times more effective than the typical 3GL approach. What no-one could agree on was how ‘fair and objective’ this measure is, when applied to an environment for which it was never designed. Still, it makes for good headlines!