Experimental evaluation of an object-oriented function point measurement procedure

This paper presents an empirical study that evaluates OO-Method Function Points (OOmFP), a functional size measurement procedure for object-oriented systems that are specified using the OO-Method approach. A laboratory experiment with students was conducted to compare OOmFP with the IFPUG – Function Point Analysis (FPA) procedure on a range of variables, including efficiency, reproducibility, accuracy, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use. The results show that OOmFP is more time-consuming than FPA but the measurement results are more reproducible and accurate. The results also indicate that OOmFP is perceived to be more useful and more likely to be adopted in practice than FPA in the context of OO-Method systems development. We also report lessons learned and suggest improvements to the experimental procedure employed and replications of this study using samples of industry practitioners.