5 - SCOPE aids traceability of business Requirements

Background

Function point counts are increasingly being used as a basis for contract management for outsourcing performance measures and for scope and cost management of software projects. Industry data shows that a typical cost to deliver a function point of software is between $1000 and $1500 per function point. fore when suppliers are being paid by the function point or developers are estimating replacement costs using function points, then every function point matters.

Microsoft Excel Counting

Problems with spreadsheets arise since they do not have a ‘tracking’ capability to record variations in requirements over the duration of a project as a means of providing an audit trail of function points documenting when and where changes occurred in the count and the reasons for the change. Typically, prior to payment to the supplier, the client requests an audit of the counts for a project to ensure that all project changes have been appropriately recorded.

Since Function Point counts are becoming increasingly the basis for contract management, then auditability and traceability of count decisions and cross-referencing to project change requests is of critical importance. Unfortunately due to the limited notation capability within Excel and each process in the count being restricted to a row, there is only very limited capacity to record:

  • Exactly which data groups are used by each process and the type of access
  • Count decisions regarding how and why a process was counted
  • What changes were made to the count, when, by whom and for what reason

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE was specifically built to provide traceability and auditability of counts over the lifetime of a project. It has unique tracking capability that can report when a change was made to the project scope and the nature of those changes. Individual Change Requests can be overlaid on the same project framework as ‘layered tracking’ that can be approved and left in the count or selectively removed with the ‘click of a mouse button’.

SCOPE: Reduces Risk and Cost

SCOPE reduces risk, saves auditing costs and ensures correct supplier payments by providing features enabling:

  • All project changes to be recorded so that they can be charged accordingly
  • Auditors to quickly assess whether project requirements changes have been applied to the count results