Measuring the size of Object-Oriented software applications

In measuring the software size, feature Points and Function Points are two examples of metric methodology. The Function Point Analysis (FPA) is by far the most popular counting method for software development used in industry. However, when applying the IFPUG standard to count the Object-Oriented software application, the resulting function points are insignificant or inaccurately low. In this paper, we present a methodology, called Object Point Analysis (OPA), for counting the object points for the Object-Oriented software application. The OPA has been used by multi-million-dollar software projects for more than six years. The positive results received from these projects provide a preliminary study on sizing of OO software application. Comparing to the FPA, the OPA not only produces a more accurate size measurement for OO software applications, but also provides a means for sizing automation, which reduces the human errors often found in FPA.