2 - SCOPE reduces Staff Costs for Counting

Background

In order to leverage project metrics for process improvement or to manage contracts, most organisations function point count all projects and the impact of each project on each of the applications it needs to change. This very quickly mounts up to hundreds of function point counts. SCOPE allows you to keep these counts in a single repository fully accessible by all authorised counters at all times.

Microsoft Excel Counting

When Applications are impacted by multiple projects very soon the number of spreadsheets generated per application becomes difficult to track and the capability to reuse and leverage from a previous count's results becomes only possible by searching through hundreds of spreadsheets to find when a particular Process or Data Group was last counted and its FP result.  The search is compounded when the Analyst is not sure of the name of the function that was recorded in the count (e.g. unsure if the process to modify the customers contact information was called - Modify Customer Details?, Maintain Customer?, Change Client Information?, Update Client?). Reuse is particularly difficult for large projects where the count has hundreds of Processes and Data Groups.  Rather than spend the time reusing past results to ensure inter-count accuracy and consistency, most FP Analysts just start again and every time spend up to 50% - 90% more effort on counting than if they could leverage from previous results.

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE's logical model of the software provides a catalogued framework of all the software's functionality that has been previously counted so that it can be quickly easily identified and reused.  Even if the counter is not sure how the function was named, its position in the framework provides an automatic index to finding it again. In addition to the logical model, SCOPE provides the capacity to cross-reference the Logical Function to the physical software entities (e.g. Logical files can be mapped to their corresponding physical tables; Processes can be mapped to one or more of their programs or screens, or specifications). So that when a change is identified by the programmers in the physical entity, the corresponding Logical entity can be easily traced in the count. Not only does this make counts more accurate but it also ensures that every logical function that is impacted by the physical change is included as part of the assessment of project size. SCOPE also allows full descriptions of all processes and files to be recorded so there is no mistake as to which one needs to be changed. SCOPE's sophisticated search functionality provides additional assistance. The Analyst counting an Enhancement project can therefore use previous counts as a framework on which to mark up the added, changed and deleted functionality for their current count.  Processes and Logical files that are part of the new project can be identified in seconds and recorded accurately in the Project scope.