Early & Quick Function Point: Sizing More with Less

The Early & Quick technique was originally proposed in 1997 for IFPUG Function Points, to size software in early stages of the development process, when functional requirements are still to be established in a detailed form and/or when a rapid measure is needed for existing software from a high-level viewpoint, within limited time. Typical lack of measurement details and requirements volatility in early project stages are overcome by the E&Q approach to provide a size estimate as a significant contribution to early project planning needs. Fundamental principles of the technique are classification by analogy, functionality structured aggregation, and multilevel approach, with statistical validation of numerical ranges. Recently, the technique has evolved, to fully comply with any Functional Size Measurement method (ISO/IEC 14143:1998), so to cover new generation methods (e.g. COSMIC Full FP 2.2) and updated releases of existing methods (e.g. IFPUG FP 4.1 and 4.2). This paper describes the current technique release 2.0, application cases, validation results, supporting tools, and further improvement directions.