8 - SCOPE maintains the Integrity of your count Repository

Background

Most organisations start counting Enhancement projects for their existing applications and once they find that knowing the functional size of their projects provides significant insight into their development environment they then want to move to the next level of metrics reporting of using the baseline size of their implemented application in their support metrics.

Microsoft Excel Counting

Microsoft Excel has no capability of taking a project count and automatically applying the changes, adding in new functions or removing obsolete functions to update a previous baseline count. Therefore most organisations are unable to maintain their baseline count with their ongoing project counts so as to fully optimise their investment in function point counts

Whilst they may initially complete the baseline sizing of their application problems occur when each Enhancement Project is counted and they need to manually apply the new additions, changes and deletions to the baseline in order to keep the baseline size current. This significantly increases the counting effort. To avoid this time-consuming overhead of manually maintaining the baseline count details, most organisations resort to just adding and subtracting from the baseline total number. The consequence is that their investment in the baseline count is wasted as it no longer reflects the functionality of the application for use other business decisions e.g. re-development planning, support contracts etc.

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE was designed to automatically manage the ongoing maintenance of the baseline count using the project counts recorded against that application. I.e. Whenever a project is counted it is recorded against the framework of the current baseline. Many projects can be counted on the same baseline and then when the User decides to Update the Baseline they can selectively apply which projects will be used. SCOPE will automatically add the new Processes and Data Groups, make changes to the existing ones and delete the any functions that have been removed by the projects. This building of the baseline allows the user to start using SCOPE to just record Enhancement counts and SCOPE will automatically build the baseline over time.

SCOPE automatically maintains integrity of baselines when projects are cancelled or postponed.

SCOPE's flexibility allows it to respond to changing project implementation decisions by being able to record the Project Impact on an Application AND be able to decide to not apply it, or to remove it or to hold it over to be applied again at a later date when the project was approved or restarted.