Modification of standard Function Point complexity weights system
Function Point (FP) is a software size measure, which includes the standard FP and many different models derived from it. The standard FP method created by Albrecht in 1979 is currently known as the International FP User group (IFPUG) version, which consists of three main parts: The first part is five components, and the second is the complexity weights that include three levels of complexity; simple, average, and complex. The third part is the general system characteristics of software projects, which consists of 14 technical complexity factors. Although, FP was widely used as a software size measure, but it still suffers from many weaknesses. One of which is the subjectivity in the weights system. In this paper a new FP weights system was established using Artificial Neural Networks. This method is a modification of the complexity weights of FP measure (IFPUG version). The final results were very accurate and much suitable when they were applied on real data sets of software projects.
software size measure artificial neural networks function point weights effort estimation